Does your professional or social life require you to make extensive use of English every day? And so, are you someone who has to be remarkably fluent?

Then one of the most basic things you must understand is this: You shouldn’t try to produce most of what you say (or write) by stringing individual words together, but by doing something entirely different: You should produce most of what you say (or write) by stringing groups of words together. Not any old group of words — but groups of words that have fluency producing properties.

The fluency phrases covered by this book are word groups that have fluency producing properties. Typically, a fluency phrase you’ll find in this book is a sequence of words that contains an idea and forms a separate unit of meaning. But they’re not opaque idioms or quasi-idioms, but word groups whose meanings are, in general, transparent. They belong to a category of expressions falling between collocations and traditional idioms. Traditional grammar and linguistics don’t have a separate name for them.

Here’s a classic book by one of the world’s foremost authorities on English fluency building. It gives you a comprehensive collection of these phrases — a rich collection that can add a smooth flow to your speech and writing. If you want to be as natural and as articulate as a native speaker of English while speaking or writing English, you must achieve a good command of these phrases. How easily and well you’re able to express your ideas, thoughts and feelings would depend, to a great extent, on the degree of this command. So the author calls these phrases ‘fluency phrases’.

For more details, read the Introduction page.