Memorable Schwa Sets:

🤩 BONUS SET #1 'About To Occur'

🤩️ BONUS SET #1 'About To Occur'

This is a multi-part series on 'Selectively Lazy English'. If you're new, you can jump back to the first set of resources ... or start at the very beginning with my intro article.

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lazy schwa words

TIP: It's a good idea listen to the audio without looking at the written examples – at least when you start.

We pronounce the highlighted spelling patterns with a lazy schwa vowel in all of the word examples below, and in all contexts – even if a speaker wants to heavily emphasise the word.

a- about, again, around, ago, alike, alone, agree, affect, afford, announce, arrange, assume

Notice that a lot of the above examples are prepositions & adverbs (like ‘about’, ‘again’) or verbs (‘agree’, ‘affect’)

o- occur, official, omit, oppose, obtain, obscure, obsess, to object (verb form)

Notice that many of these schwa words starting with ‘o’ are verbs.

lazy schwa sentences:

They’ve rearranged and, yet again, there’s been no announcement.

I agree, we shouldn’t assume everyone can afford the flights.

Officially, they don’t oppose the plans: but plenty of people have objected.

I managed to obtain the transcript, but they omitted every offensive comment he made.

exception words:

a- answer, apple, arrow, Adam, anti- (e.g. anticlockwise, antibiotics, …)

o- open, office, other, optical, orange, object (noun form)

There are thousands of exceptions for both A and O patterns – perhaps because both schwa patterns contain just a single letter.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the exceptions are noun forms, with the occasional verb form such as ‘answer’ or ‘open’.

exception sentences:

I’m open to the other treatment: I don’t think antibiotics are the answer.

There was a weird object standing in the middle of the office: it looked like some kind of optical illusion.