Confident, articulate English for work, exams and life

Hello, I'm Hugh Wise. With a Cambridge CELTA certification, a Russell Group Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Science, and over five years of teaching experience, I have helped a great many students speak with more assurance, and be understood with less effort.

My interest is in practical, eloquent English: the kind that serves you in ordinary conversation and still holds up in a boardroom, a lecture theatre, or the pages of The Economist. Most students arrive wanting one register and leave with the range to move between several.

Speaking a second language in front of another person is an exposing thing to do, particularly when you suspect you are being judged for it. I take that seriously. Lessons move at the pace you can genuinely work at, and confidence tends to arrive alongside accuracy rather than after it.

I was educated at Winchester College, often regarded as the finest school in the country. Its emphasis on academic rigour and precise, articulate speech shaped my approach to language teaching. That foundation in English and the humanities is something I bring to every lesson, helping my students become articulate, confident speakers.

My living comes from English in more ways than teaching. For the better part of a year I worked as a writing specialist for DataAnnotation, training frontier AI models in written English. The task was to read what a model had written and say exactly what was wrong with it. Outright errors were the straightforward part, and a model learns those quickly. The difficulty lay in the sentence that is grammatically sound and still wrong: the register that slips a degree, the idiom bent slightly out of shape, the phrasing no native speaker would choose and few could explain why. Those judgements became the material the model was trained on. The work was graded; mine sat in the top tier, and I was invited onto their internal team.

That is close reading of an unusually unforgiving kind, and it asks for the same faculty a lesson does. Very little of what I correct in a student's English is the sort of mistake a grammar book would catch. It is the distance between what was said and what was meant, and naming that distance quickly is most of the skill.

It also left me with a clear view of what these models do badly. Most people now write some of their English with a model's help and trust it further than they should. What it returns is fluent, clean and quietly wrong for the situation: too formal for a colleague, too familiar for a client, idiomatic in the American register when you wanted the British one, and confident throughout. If you draft in English with AI, I can show you where it is letting you down, and how to steer it so that what comes out still sounds like you.

I write, too. A feature of mine ran in The Times magazine — four pages, published anonymously, the subject being sensitive enough to require it — and I have worked as a writing consultant on a Global Talent visa application for a US politician and author, overseeing it from first draft to submission. It was granted, and I hold a written reference. These are the same act performed on different material: taking English that is nearly right and making it exactly right. That is most of what happens in a lesson, too.