✅  A speech and a harangue are both words that describe someone talking to an audience. However, you don’t want to mix them up.

✅  A speech is any kind of address given to an audience by a speaker (My sister gave a speech at my wedding), and it can be any length or tone.

✅  On the other hand, a harangue is usually a long and intense verbal attack (The harangue was vulgar and intimidating, as it was intended to be).

✅  Harangue can also refer to a public speech that’s overly long or boring, but in any case it’s almost always used as a negative word.

Try writing a harangue about something that’s bothering you with the help of Grammar Coach!

✅  Teach can be used in a variety of circumstances, and is never a bad choice for describing imparting information or understanding to someone (My dad wanted to teach me how to garden; I decided to teach myself guitar).

✅  In the context of formal, general instruction, the more formal verb educate may be more appropriate.

✅  Educate most often implies in-depth, long-term teaching about a particular topic or a range of topics (It's important how we educate children).

✅  Educate can imply a formal or structured attempt to teach something, whereas teach can apply to all kinds of different ways of teaching, even situations in which the lesson learned is different than the one being taught (She thought she was teaching me math, but she was actually teaching me to be a good person).

Teach yourself even more with these synonyms for educate!

✅  Accomplish is the perfect word to use when the thing you’ve done was important or difficult.

✅  Accomplish is similar to succeed, but it simply means that something is finished, that you’ve reached your goal, and it wasn’t easy (We’ll have succeeded if we simply accomplish our mission).

✅  It’s better to use do instead of accomplish when the thing you’re trying to perform or complete is pretty easy, or when you’re not trying to finish it off (She wanted him to sign the letter—is he doing it?).

Try using accomplish in a paragraph about your goals for the future, with the help of Grammar Coach!