Collocations: make and do

Do and make are two verbs with similar meanings, and sometimes it's difficult to choose one or the other.

Make often expresses the idea of creation:

Let's make a cake!

Do is used to talk about an activity without saying exactly what it is.

What are you doing?

Do is always used with something, anything, everything, nothing...

Come on, boys, do something!

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In other cases there are no clear rules. We have to learn the different collocations.

A collocation is a combination of two or more words that happens very often in a language. These words are generally used together. For example, in English you can say: “I like strong tea”, where “strong tea” is a collocation, because both words tend to appear together. It's not usual to see a synonym for “strong” instead of this word: “powerful tea” cannot be said. So, language learners should try to use the correct collocations if they want to sound natural when speaking a foreign language.

That's what happens with do and make: we have to learn the collocations in which they appear. These are the most important:

DO		MAKE
one's duty	the housework	sure	an offer
good	harm	arrangements	a suggestion
business	one's best	a mistake	a phone call
a favour	research	an appointment	sense
the shopping	the washing-up	a promise	the most of...
the dishes	the homework	love	war

Have a look at this presentation and do the exercises at the end of it:


 Now you can do these exercises to see how much you have learnt:

• Fill in the gaps with make or do 1
• Fill in the gaps with make or do 2
• Choose the correct answer