Confused Words - EFFECT & AFFECT

Hi, my name is Rebecca and in today's lesson we're going to clarify the difference between

two commonly confused words and those two words are "affect" and "effect", ok?

I'll pronounce them for you once again, "affect" and "effect".

Now, what are the differences between these?

Let's look.

The first word "affect" is a verb.

The second word "effect" is a noun, alright?

That's the first difference.

So the word "affect" as a verb refers to when you change someone or something.

The second word "effect", the noun, refers to a change that happens because something

else happened, alright?

I know that sounds a little bit confusing.

Let's look at some examples and I hope you'll understand a little bit better.

So when we're talking about changes, we could be talking about all kinds of changes, right?

So we could be referring to a physical change, a mental change, psychological or any other

kind.

Let me give you an example.

Smoking affected the condition of his lungs.

Smoking affected the condition of his lungs, right?

I used the verb "affect" in the past tense, "affected".

We could use the same example and use the noun, right?

Smoking had a negative effect on his lungs.

Smoking had a negative effect on his lungs.

Sometimes when we want to say negative, we could also use the vocabulary word "adverse".

Smoking had an adverse effect on his lungs.

Okay, let's take another example, "mental", where something is affected mentally, right?

Staying up all night affected his concentration, right?

Staying up all night affected his concentration.

If we change it, we could say, "Staying up all night had a strong effect on his concentration."

Staying up all night had a strong effect on his concentration.

Now we used the noun instead of the verb.

If we give an example of a psychological nature, we could say, "Losing her grandmother at an

early age affected the young child."

Losing her grandmother affected the young child.

We used the verb, correct?

Or we could say, "The loss of her grandmother had a negative effect on the young child."

Now we used the noun, okay?

So as you can see, they are also spelt differently, right, "a" and "e".

The verb "effect" is spelt with "a", the noun "effect" is spelt with an "e", alright?

So two little words, but one more way in which you can improve your English once you understand

the difference between the two.

So thanks very much.

Continue to improve your English.

If you have any questions, please feel free to write to us at www.engvid.com.

Thanks very much.

Bye for now.