My first 39 myths about English were published in The Write Stuff in a series of articles between January 2006 and January 2008.

The myths are mainly drawn from claims about English made by participants at my training events on the use of English in the scientific and medical context. Participants often tell me: ‘An English native speaker told me that there is a rule that …’. And native speakers of English often say: ‘I learned that …’. Because the teaching of rules about the use of English has been patchy since the mid-1970s in the two countries with the most native English speakers (the United Kingdom and the USA) – and I suspect also in other major English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia – I do wonder where these ‘rules’ were learned.