Phrasal verb: doze off - Day 18 with JenniferESL

It's Day 18.

I hope your studies are going all right.

I think you have to learn how much time is effective for you.

Studying for one or two hours sounds impressive,

but truthfully, you might start to doze off after the first thirty minutes.

That's why I suggest that you take 5-10 minutes a day.

I know you can stay awake and focused for that long.

What does this phrasal verb mean?

Now because it's intransitive,

can you identify the stress pattern?

We stress the particle.

Listen again.

It's the same pattern you've heard with other intransitive phrasal verbs.

For example,

Did you ever doze off in the middle of a class or a meeting?

Did anyone notice?

In this review, we'll go over some of the previous phrasal verbs

as we talk about informal and formal English.

Did you know that the use of phrasal verbs generally creates informal speech?

These sentences sound conversational.

More formal equivalents would be...

Often those more formal equivalents are one-word verbs,

but not always.

Let's first read the text together.

Look back to the first line.

"Successfully complete a project" - how else could we say that?

Look down further.

"Spend time improving something"

What could we use?

In the next paragraph...

"Falling asleep on the job"

We can say..."dozing off."

And finally, toward the end...

"Review"

"Look closely at"

We could say..."go over."

With the use of phrasal verbs in the text,

it's beginning to sound more conversational.

Less formal.

But if we really want to make it more informal,

we should make a few other changes.

Let's use contractions and more everyday vocabulary.

We have a chance to use a contraction.

Let's change "must" to something more conversational.

At the end of the first paragraph, we have the phrase "in this manner."

Further, we have "risk losing."

And finally, "address errors."

Take a moment to look at all the changes we made.

We went from more formal to less formal.