To continue doing something, especially after an interruption or difficulty.
To continue doing something without stopping, especially after a problem, interruption, or setback. It suggests persistence and the determination to keep going despite difficulties.
Type
Inseparable
Collocations
carry on with something — continue an activity or task
carry on regardless — continue despite difficulties
carry on! — an imperative encouraging someone to continue
⚠️ Watch out
Sounds distinctly British and can feel overly casual in American professional English, where 'continue' is usually preferred instead.
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In August 1914, Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition set sail from London aboard the Endurance. By January 1915, the ship was {{trapped|verb-various-tenses|easy}} in pack ice in the Weddell Sea. For ten months the crew drifted, locked in ice, watching the ship slowly being crushed. When the Endurance finally sank in November 1915, Shackleton and his twenty-seven men were stranded on the ice with three lifeboats and dwindling supplies. {{Rather than|connective|medium}} surrender to despair, Shackleton organized daily routines, maintained morale, and led the men on a {{harrowing|adjective|hard}} 800-mile open-sea voyage to South Georgia Island — {{navigating|verb-various-tenses|medium}} by sextant, enduring {{hurricane-force|adjective|medium}} winds — to reach a whaling station and summon rescue. Every {{single|adjective|easy}} crew member survived. What made the difference was Shackleton's refusal to stop: when each plan failed, he {{formed|verb-various-tenses|hard}} a new one. {{So|connective|easy}}, the expedition became one of history's most extraordinary examples of what it means to {{carry on|phrasal-verb|medium}} in the face of total, sustained catastrophe.
To continue or proceed means to resume or keep doing something after a pause, delay, or interruption, moving forward without stopping again. It implies a deliberate decision to press on despite whatever has caused the break.
Type
Intransitive verb / verb phrase
Collocations
continue with something — used when resuming a specific task or plan (e.g. continue with the journey)
proceed along — used for physical movement along a route (e.g. proceed along the motorway)
continue despite — signals persistence in the face of obstacles (e.g. continue despite the delay)
decide to proceed — common in neutral decision-making contexts (e.g. they decided to proceed after the briefing)
continue toward — indicates direction of resumed travel (e.g. continue toward the city centre)
⚠️ Watch out
Be careful not to use 'proceed' in casual spoken contexts where it can sound stiff or overly formal — in everyday conversation, 'continue' is almost always the safer neutral choice. Avoid saying 'proceed' when giving simple instructions to friends or family, as it may come across as bureaucratic.
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Marcus had been cycling across the country for eleven days when his rear tyre blew out on a quiet country road, forty miles from the next town. He sat by the roadside for a moment, weighing his options. A passing motorist offered a lift, but Marcus politely declined. He patched the tyre, ate the last of his cereal bar, and decided to continue. The road was long and the afternoon light was fading, but he kept moving. By dusk, he could see the town's water tower on the horizon. He chose to proceed slowly but steadily, knowing that stopping again would only make it harder to start. He made it before dark.
The morning the bridge reopened, local residents barely noticed. For most people driving into town, it was simply a Tuesday. But for the small community in Hartwell, a village of around 800 people on the edge of the valley, it meant something far more significant: life could continue in the way it had before the floods.
The bridge had been closed for almost four months following damage caused by record-breaking rainfall in late autumn. During that time, schoolchildren had been bussed along a winding fourteen-mile detour, delivery drivers had struggled with access, and the village's only GP surgery had been forced to temporarily relocate its services.
Now, with the structure fully repaired and safety checks completed by the county council, traffic was once again flowing freely. The first vehicle to cross — a milk van, as it happened — was greeted with a small round of applause from a group of locals who had gathered near the verge.
"It's hard to explain what this means unless you lived through it," said one resident, a retired teacher who has lived in Hartwell for thirty years. "We can proceed with normal life again. That sounds like a small thing, but it really isn't."
In professional contexts, 'maintain / resume' means to continue an activity, process, or workflow after it has been interrupted or paused. 'Maintain' emphasises keeping something going consistently, while 'resume' specifically signals a return to action following a defined break or disruption.
Type
Transitive verb (both 'maintain' and 'resume' take a direct object in professional usage)
Collocations
resume operations — used when restarting business processes after a halt
resume normal service — common in client-facing communications after a disruption
maintain productivity — describes keeping output levels consistent during a period of change
maintain momentum — used in project management contexts to stress continuity of progress
resume discussions — formal phrase for returning to a negotiation or meeting after a break
⚠️ Watch out
Avoid using 'resume' when no prior interruption has occurred — it specifically implies a return after a pause, so applying it to something that never stopped is technically incorrect. 'Maintain' can be confused with simply 'keep' in informal registers; in formal work English, ensure the object is a process, standard, or obligation rather than a physical object.
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When the merger negotiations were unexpectedly suspended in October, the legal team at Hartwell & Associates found themselves in a frustrating holding pattern. Files were archived, calls were cancelled, and weeks passed with little clarity from senior leadership. Then, on a quiet Tuesday morning, a brief email arrived from the CEO: the board had resolved the internal dispute and authorised the team to resume all merger-related activities immediately. The atmosphere in the office shifted noticeably. Lawyers returned to their desks with purpose, paralegals retrieved archived documents, and the project manager updated the shared timeline within the hour. The instruction was clear — maintain the original closing schedule wherever possible and escalate only genuine blockers. By the end of the week, it felt as though the interruption had never happened.
The corridor outside the boardroom was quieter than usual on the morning of 9th February. Three weeks earlier, Caldwell Dynamics had announced a companywide pause on all non-essential projects, a response to unexpectedly poor Q4 results and growing pressure from institutional investors. Entire departments had been left in a state of suspension — budgets frozen, vendor contracts paused, roadmaps shelved. For many employees, the uncertainty had been harder to manage than the workload itself.
Then came the all-staff memo from the Chief Operating Officer. In measured, careful language, it confirmed that the company's financial position had stabilised and that affected teams were authorised to resume their project work in line with the priorities outlined in the updated strategic framework attached to the memo. Department heads were asked to hold briefings with their teams by end of week.
For Miriam Osei, Head of Product Development, the relief was immediate. She had spent the past three weeks fielding anxious messages from her team and external partners alike. Now she could respond with something concrete. Her first act was to schedule a team call for that afternoon, during which she would confirm timelines, clarify updated expectations, and remind everyone that the company's commitment to maintain high delivery standards had not changed — only the timeline had shifted. The work, at last, could begin again.
In academic English, 'persist in / sustain' refers to the act of continuing a course of action, inquiry, or process after an interruption, delay, or obstacle, implying deliberate effort and scholarly resolve. It conveys that the subject consciously maintains engagement with a task or argument despite intervening difficulties.
Type
Verb phrase (intransitive + prepositional complement for 'persist in'; transitive verb phrase for 'sustain')
Collocations
persist in one's inquiry — used to describe continued scholarly investigation after a pause
sustain a line of argument — maintaining a theoretical position across an extended text
persist in the face of — formal expression of continuation despite named obstacles
sustain momentum — often used in research methodology sections to describe uninterrupted analytical progress
persist in applying — collocates with methodological or theoretical frameworks being consistently reused
⚠️ Watch out
Writers should note that 'persist in' requires a gerund complement ('persist in conducting', not 'persist to conduct'), a grammatical point frequently violated by non-native academic writers. Additionally, 'sustain' as a transitive verb demands a clear direct object; using it intransitively ('the team sustained') without a complement produces ambiguity inappropriate for formal scholarly prose.
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Dr Okonkwo had not anticipated the visa complications that would stall her fieldwork in Dakar for nearly six weeks. Colleagues urged her to redesign her study around a closer site, but she was determined to persist in the original research plan, convinced that the coastal communities she had already begun documenting were irreplaceable to her argument. When she finally returned, she found her contacts still willing to engage. She sustained the observational methodology she had established before the interruption, noting with quiet satisfaction that the continuity made her comparative data far more coherent. The delay, it turned out, had cost her time but not her scholarly purpose.
The concept of interrupted inquiry sits at a curious intersection of methodology and identity. When a researcher is compelled to pause — whether by institutional constraint, geopolitical circumstance, or the contingencies of travel — the question of how they re-engage with their material upon return is rarely theorised with adequate rigour. In practice, the decision to persist in an established analytical framework, rather than treating the interruption as an opportunity for wholesale methodological revision, is one of the most consequential choices a field researcher can make. Yet it receives surprisingly little attention in research design literature.
Consider the case of scholars engaged in longitudinal studies of nomadic communities. Their work is structurally dependent on mobility — both their own and that of their subjects. Environmental disruptions, border closures, or funding gaps routinely sever the continuity of observation. What distinguishes the most epistemically coherent studies in this tradition is not the absence of such interruptions, but the researcher's capacity to sustain the theoretical and relational scaffolding constructed before the pause. Data gathered across a discontinuous timeline, held together by consistent interpretive principles, can yield insights unavailable to studies conducted under artificially smooth conditions. Interruption, reframed, becomes not an obstacle to knowledge but a constitutive feature of it.