Happy New Year

Happy New Year¹ to colleagues and clients² of Specialist Language!

I hope³ your New Year’s Eve celebrations⁴ were a lot of⁵ fun.

Roll on⁶ 2021⁷, even if we continue⁸ to work from home⁹!

I am looking forward¹⁰ to hearing¹¹ from you soon.

Regards¹², Sean

Key to superscript reference numbers:

• HNY can be used as an abbreviation for “Happy New Year”
• Firms generally have a closer relationship with “clients” than with “customers”
• Not “I am hoping”
• Scottish Language variant: Hogmanay
• “a lot of” is usually more natural than either “much” or “many” and doesn’t change according to whether the noun is countable or not
• This is the imperative form of a non-separable phrasal verb
• You can say this “twenty twenty-one” or “two thousand and twenty-one”
• When “continue” is followed by a verb, the verb takes the infinitive
• Not “Home Office” – this is a department of the government
• “Looking forward” is followed by a present participle (the -ing form).
• Not “reading from you”
• This is preferable to KR or BR

Twelve tricky instances of English idiom and grammar in such a short message! Which one causes learners of English the most problems?

ExecNews

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