How I've been improving the lesson categories

My problem with categories

Have you explored the Categories page on PhraseMix? It's a useful way to review lessons on different topics, like business, shopping, or phrasal verbs. 

I realized something recently while writing Twitter messages to advertise some of the categories. I had categories like "family", so I would try to write a message about it like this:

Learn how to talk to your family in #English with these 17 lessons: http://www.phrasemix.com/englishphrases/tag/family

However, I noticed that this description didn't fit the "family" category perfectly. Some of the sentences weren't things that you say to your family. Some of them were sentences about people's families. So I would have to write a description like this:

Learn 17 things to say to, or about, your family: http://www.phrasemix.com/englishphrases/tag/family

That description isn't as simple as the earlier one. Plus, what if there are also sentences that family members say to you? Then I'd have to write:

Learn 17 things to say to your family, about your family, or that your family says about you: http://www.phrasemix.com/englishphrases/tag/family

That's way too complicated!

A better way to make categories

I realized that many topics actually include at least two different types of communication:

• things you say about that topic
• things you say when you're in that situation

For example, take a topic like "driving". Here's something you might say about driving:

I'm not a very good driver.

Here's something that you might say while you're driving:

Hey! Watch where you're going!

To differentiate between these two types of communication, I've now started to break categories up into different groups. For example, there are now two categories related to "family":

• "Family" is for things that you say to your family, or things that they say to you.
• "Family (topic)" is for things that you say about someone's family

Here are some other topics that have been separated into more specific categories:

• friend / friend (topic)
• home / home (topic)
• angry / anger (topic)
• boss (recipient) / boss (speaker) / boss (topic)
• children (talking to) / children (topic)
• work / work (topic)

Tagging lessons takes a long time, so not all of the categories have been broken up this way yet. If you see a category that you think should be broken up, please let me know.