In reality

In reality

The phrase I want to share with you today is “in reality.” This is a good one if you find yourself saying the word “actually” a lot. You can use the phrase “in reality” when you want to contrast what you expected with what actually is true, or with what actually happened. The French police called Redoine Faid “The Writer” because he wrote a book. Do you remember what that book was about? It was about how he had given up a life of crime. Right—that was before he committed the majority of his crimes. So, he said he had given up crime, but in reality, he was just getting started. We may have expected him to be on the straight-and-narrow, to be a nice law-abiding citizen since he wrote a book about his experiences and promised to have given up criminal activity. But the truth was, in reality, he was just getting started on his life of crime.

I’ll give you a couple more examples. I thought this was going to be a relatively easy episode to research and write, since it’s not a really complicated topic. But in reality, it was pretty difficult, since the articles I read were confusing and didn’t really explain Faid’s history very clearly. I had to do a lot more work than I was expecting to put the pieces of this story together. I thought it was going to be easy, but in reality it was kind of hard.

French police may have thought they were guarding Faid carefully after his first escape from jail. But in reality, they weren’t doing enough, since he was monitoring the jail from drones and escaped a second time. Here’s a good example. When I was first learning Spanish, I thought that reading Harry Potter books would be a good way for me to practice. But in reality, it was not a great idea, since a lot of the words in Harry Potter books are not common words—spells, potions, wizardry, things like that.

In reality—so keep that in mind next time you want to say “actually” to describe how something turned out differently than you expected.

You know I mentioned Harry Potter books earlier. If you already know the story, those might not be bad books to try in audio format. I have listened to a sample of the first Harry Potter book in audiobook format and it’s pretty good; not too fast. And if you want to get that one for free, you can try signing up for a free trial at Audible by going to PlainEnglish.com/book. If you do that, you’ll be taken to a sign up page that has all the details. Just remember, you have to sign up for a trial membership. If you don’t want to pay in the future, just cancel within the first 30 days and you can keep the sample book. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is eight hours of English audio—all from a story that you already know and love, and totally free. So check that out at PlainEnglish.com/book if you’re a Harry Potter fan.

That’s it for today’s episode of Plain English. Thanks for being with us again. We’ll be back here on Monday for Episode number 94