Conversational English - How to Generalize

http://www.engvid.com/ "Overall", "basically", "on the whole"… Watch and learn a wide variety of expressions to discuss issues in general. Watch this lesson to improve your English in professional and academic situations. Then take the quiz: http://www.engvid.com/conversational-english-how-to-generalize/

TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. My name is Rebecca, and in today’s lesson, I’m going to show you a number of words and expressions that you can use when you want to generalize about something, when you want to speak about something in general. Okay? So let’s look at them. They’re very useful when you’re discussing an issue with someone, or if you’re writing an essay, or a paper about something. You can certainly use these transition kind of words and these expressions.

Here we go. Okay. So, here’s the first one: "Overall," okay? You can also practice pronouncing them after me, if you like. "Overall,", "Generally,", "Basically,", "All in all,", "On the whole,", okay? So all of these mean that you’re going to make a statement which is a general statement, or comment, or remark.

So, for example, you could start with something like this: "Overall, I believe the situation is out of control." And you don’t have to say this part. You could just say: "Overall, the situation is out of control." But you could add this, if you’re saying that… If you want to qualify it and explain that that’s your perspective and your view. Okay? You can do that with any of them. "Generally, I think the govt has misspent our money." "Misspent" means spent it in the wrong way or in a bad way.