Six that come straight from Portuguese
Six sentences. Each is a word-for-word translation that English will not take.
1. The my brother lives in Porto.
2. She broke the arm falling off a bicycle.
3. He put the hands in the pockets and said nothing.
4. The our house was at the end of a lane.
5. I washed the hair before we left.
6. The Ana came with us.
A paragraph that gets it right
The lane
Our house was at the end of a lane, and the lane was the reason we knew everybody. There was one way in and the same way out, so you passed the same six doors twice a day for eleven years.
The first house belonged to a man who kept bees. The only other child on the lane was his granddaughter, who came in August. I broke my wrist falling off her bicycle in the summer I was nine, and the bicycle was returned to the shed with a bent wheel and never mentioned by either of us again.
The best thing about the lane was that it went nowhere. Nobody drove down it who did not live on it. The worst thing was the same fact, viewed from the age of sixteen.
Four questions about why each article is where it is.
1. a lane, then the lane three words later. Which route?
2. The first house, the only other child, the best thing. What do these have in common?
3. I broke my wrist — why not the wrist?
4. Our house — why is there no the in front of it?
The checking procedure
The four routes, as a test you can run on your own writing
| Route | Ask yourself | If yes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Mentioned before | Have I already introduced this, in this text? | Use the |
| 2 · Present | Can my reader see it, or are we standing in it? | Use the |
| 3 · Unique in our shared world | Is there only one, for both of us? the sun, the government, the kitchen | Use the |
| 4 · Made unique by what follows | Do the words after the noun narrow it to one? the end of our street | Use the |
| None of the four | — | Use a if it is one of several; nothing if you mean the kind of thing |
Three shortcuts that always take the
| Trigger | Why | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Superlative | Only one thing can be the most | the best thing, the oldest house |
| Ordinal | Only one thing can be first | the first house, the second time |
| only, same, next, last | Each of these allows exactly one candidate | the only child, the same way, the next town |
And two places where English refuses an article altogether.
With a possessive. my, your, his, her, our, their and Ana’s already do the identifying, so no article can join them. the my car, the Ana’s house. Portuguese allows both; English allows one.
With body parts. English says whose: she broke her arm, he shook my hand, put your hands up. She broke the arm is understood, and sounds like a shop dummy.
Five sentences. Which route, or which refusal?
1. We rented ___ flat above a bakery. ___ flat was freezing.
2. ___ oldest building in the village is the school.
3. He cut ___ finger on a tin.
4. ___ sister lives in Lisbon.
5. There is ___ church at the top of the hill. — first mention
Ten choices, eight repairs
Ten sentences. Choose, and be ready to name the route.
1. I met ___ woman on the train who had lived there in the 1960s.
2. ___ woman told me the mill had closed twice.
3. It was ___ first time I had gone back alone.
4. She lost ___ ring somewhere between the station and the house.
5. ___ kitchen was the only warm room. (in the house we are discussing)
6. ___ people who stayed are mostly over sixty now.
7. ___ people leave places like that. (people in general)
8. He held out ___ hand and I did not take it.
9. It is ___ only shop for nine miles.
10. ___ Manuel’s house had the best view on the lane.
Eight sentences. Seven contain an error; one is correct.
1. The my grandmother lived in a village near the sea.
2. It was best summer of my childhood.
3. He broke the leg playing football.
4. There was a church at the top of the hill, and a church was always locked.
5. The only road out floods every winter. — correct as written
6. I went back for a first time last year.
7. The João moved away in 2011.
8. We sat in kitchen because it was the only warm room.
Audit your own paragraph
Task card · Pairs · 10 minutes · Writing then checking
Write six sentences about the place you described in Lesson 1. Then swap and audit each other’s.
Four minutes writing, six minutes auditing both paragraphs together.
- Write six sentences. Do not think about articles while you write — that is the point.
- Swap. Underline every the. Beside each, write 1, 2, 3 or 4 for the route that justifies it.
- Any the with no number is the writer’s to repair, out loud, now.
- Then look for the opposite: a noun with no article that needed one, and a generalisation carrying a the.
Why a partner and not yourself. Route three — unique in the world we share — is the one you cannot audit alone, because your own shared world always includes you. Somebody else has to be the test of what "shared" means.
Which route was missing
Two questions.
1. Most unjustified thes in the room were doing what?
2. Which route did your partner most often have to reject?
Four routes, two refusals
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. Which words force the on their own?
2. Where does English refuse an article outright?
Next. Five or six minutes describing one place, without notes, to somebody who has never been there — which is where the routes stop being a checklist.