Natalka Skakalka
Lead Editor & Founder — M.A. in English Linguistics, 10+ years teaching English to IT professionals.
About
Natalka Skakalka has spent over ten years helping adult learners — primarily software developers, product managers, and other IT professionals — become confident communicators in English. She founded GrammarTips.net after noticing that the same grammar questions came up in almost every class, and that the existing answers online were either too academic or too vague to be useful.
The site is her attempt to fix that: every article answers one question directly, uses real examples, and doesn’t assume the reader has studied linguistics. The rule first, the exceptions second, the historical background never — unless it actually helps.
Teaching approach
After a decade in the classroom, one thing became clear: adult learners don’t want to memorise rules — they want to stop second-guessing themselves. The most effective way to do that isn’t drilling exceptions; it’s understanding why the rule exists in the first place.
That philosophy shapes every article on GrammarTips.net. Rules are explained in terms of function, not category. “Use fewer for things you can count” is easier to remember than “fewer is used with count nouns.” The meaning is the same; the memorability isn’t.
Experience
Ten-plus years of one-on-one and group instruction, working primarily with non-native speakers in professional environments. Subjects covered range from everyday business communication to technical documentation, code comments, interview preparation, and public speaking in English.
Beyond teaching, Natalka personally writes and reviews every article published on GrammarTips.net. Each piece is cross-referenced against multiple authoritative style guides and checked for usage frequency in real corpora — not just rules from a single textbook.
Areas of expertise
Education
M.A. in English Linguistics. Ongoing professional development in TESOL methodology, second-language acquisition research, and digital pedagogy. Member of language-learning educator communities where she regularly contributes grammar Q&A and writing feedback.