Stack Exchange: English language sites

Page contents

This page consists of a list of the questions on the ELL and ELU sites to which I responded. Only the question title is shown here, not the full question.

If you click the question title The question title was written by the asker of the question. In many cases the title is not informative or grammatical. , you will see my answer. Each answer is preceded by a link to the corresponding Stack Exchange web page in a new window, where you can read the full question, together with my answer and any answers submitted by other visitors to the page.

If you want to browse my answers on the Stack Exchange site itself, then type user:1296 (ELL) or user:11146 (ELU) into the search box at the top of the ELL/ELU page, and press Enter.

Information about Stack Exchange English sites

ELU positions itself as "a question and answer site for linguists, etymologists, and serious English language enthusiasts". However, from the start it attracted some very basic questions. This eventually led some of the regular ELU users to advocate for a separate site where non-native speakers of English could get expert answers to the typical questions non-native speakers have about grammar and vocabulary.

The request for a new site was approved and ELL came into existence as "a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English."

In theory, splitting the original ELU site into two separate sites may have been a good idea. But in practice it is often difficult to decide if a question belongs on ELL or ELU. Moderators do often migrate questions between the two sites (albeit much more often from ELU to ELL than vice versa).

But moderators have neither very clear criteria nor the time to do this consistently. The consequence is the existence of two sites on which there is a considerable overlap in the nature and 'difficulty' of the questions.

Questions on this page

In view of the above, I have decided to aggregate my answers on the two sites into this one page. This makes the page very long. And you need to be patient after clicking the Expand All button before all the answers appear. But expanding the answers allows you to do a full page search on a grammar term or English word that you are interested in.

At the time of the creation of this page in late 2020 there are about 700 questions. New questions will be added at the top of the list and marked with the month/year date.