English Grammar Workbook for Dummies.
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| English Grammar Workbook for Dummies. |
About This Book
English Grammar Workbook For Dummies doesn’t concentrate on what we English teachers
(yes, I confess I am one) call descriptive grammar — the kind where you circle all the nouns
and draw little triangles around the prepositions. A closely guarded English-teacher secret is
that you don’t need to know any of that terminology (well, hardly any) to master grammar.
Instead, English Grammar Workbook For Dummies concentrates on functional grammar — what
goes where in real-life speech and writing.
Each chapter begins with a quick explanation of the rules (don’t smoke, don’t stick your
chewing gum on the bedpost, be sure your sentence is complete, and so forth). Okay, I’m
kidding about the smoking and the chewing gum, but you get the idea. I start off telling you
what’s right and wrong in standard English usage. Next, I provide an example and then hit
you with ten or so quick questions. Just to make sure you know that I’m not wasting your
time, in every chapter I give you a sample from real-life English (with a fairly absurd situation,
just to keep your funny bone tingling), so you can see how proper grammar actually
aids communication.
After filling in the blanks, you can check your answers at the end of the chapter. In English
Grammar Workbook For Dummies, I also tell you why a particular choice is correct, not just
for the sake of learning a set of rules but rather to help you make the right decision the next
time — when you’re deciding between their and they’re or went and had gone, for example.