Advanced (CAE) C1 Key Word Transformations - Inversion

Once your students get to a high C1 level, there isn’t much grammar left to surprise or challenge them. It’s often more important to focus on accuracy than to introduce things that are completely new. However, there are still a few nice, juicy grammar points that we can teach our Advanced students. Inversion is one of those. And, like always, it’s a good idea in an exam class to include the grammar the same way your students may see it in the exam. That’s why we’ve prepared inversion transformations for you to use with your CAE students.

These transformations and many more are part of our book 230 Key Word Transformations for the Cambridge C1 Advanced (CAE) exam. The book is available as a digital download here on Breakout English or grab a physical paperback copy on Amazon.

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Contents

Inversion

In formal English, and in written language in particular, we use negative adverbials at the beginning of the sentence to make it more emphatic or dramatic.

The word order is inverted:

negative adverbial + auxiliary verb + subject + verb

Compare this example from a complaint letter:

NORMAL – I have never had such a bad experience before.

INVERSION – Never before have I had such a bad experience.

While it is an excellent idea to encourage your students to use inversion in their writing and potentially in speaking, inversion should only be used occasionally for dramatic effect. Overusing it will make their English sound rather unnatural.

Negative adverbials used in inversion

These are some commonly seen negative adverbials that are used with inversion.

Not only
Never before
Under no circumstances
On no account
Hardly (ever)
Seldom
Rarely
At no time
No sooner…than
Never again
No longer
In no way
Little (did he/she know)
Not until…*
Not since…*
Only when…*

*Note: Inversion is normally used in the clause directly following the negative adverbial. However, with these adverbials, inversion is used in the 2nd clause (e.g. Not until almost everyone had left did Nick start to have fun)