Confident, articulate English for work, exams and life

Hello, I'm Hugh Wise. With a Cambridge CELTA certification, a Russell Group Bachelor of Arts, a Master of Science, and over five years of teaching experience, I have helped a great many students speak with more assurance, and be understood with less effort.

My focus is on practical, eloquent English — the kind you can use confidently in everyday conversation, yet polished enough to command respect in the most formal settings. Whether you want to navigate daily interactions with ease or impress colleagues and peers with sophisticated, articulate expression, I offer the full spectrum: from functional communication to refined, high-level English that wouldn't be out of place in a boardroom, an academic lecture, or the pages of The Economist.

I know that speaking English can feel daunting, especially when you're worried about making mistakes or not being understood. That's why my teaching style focuses on building your confidence alongside your skills — so you can express yourself freely and naturally, without hesitation.

I was educated at Winchester College, often regarded as the finest school in the country. Its emphasis on academic rigour and precise, articulate speech shaped my approach to language teaching. That foundation in English and the humanities is something I bring to every lesson, helping my students become articulate, confident speakers.

My living comes from English in more ways than teaching. For the past six months I have been a writing specialist for DataAnnotation, training frontier AI models in written English. The task is to read what a model has written and say exactly what is wrong with it. Outright errors are the straightforward part, and a model learns them quickly. The difficulty lies in the sentence that is grammatically sound and still wrong — the register that slips a degree, the idiom bent slightly out of shape, the phrasing no native speaker would choose and few could explain why. Those judgements become the material the model is trained on. The work is graded; mine sits in the top tier, and they have since invited me onto their internal team.

That is close reading of an unusually unforgiving kind, and it asks for the same faculty a lesson does. Very little of what I correct in a student's English is the sort of mistake a grammar book would catch. It is the distance between what was said and what was meant, and naming that distance quickly is most of the skill.

I write, too. A feature of mine ran in The Times magazine — four pages, published anonymously, the subject being sensitive enough to require it — and I have worked as a writing consultant on the US politician and author Marianne Williamson's Global Talent visa application, overseeing it from first draft to submission. It was granted, and she has since given me a written reference. These are the same act performed on different material: taking English that is nearly right and making it exactly right. That is most of what happens in a lesson, too.