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    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook: Simple Rules and Quizzes to Master Today's English
    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook: Simple Rules and Quizzes to Master Today's English
    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook: Simple Rules and Quizzes to Master Today's English
    Ebook279 pages2 hours

    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook: Simple Rules and Quizzes to Master Today's English

    By Lisa McLendon

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    About this ebook

    Grammar greatness—with simple rules, exercises, and quizzes.

    Mastering English grammar has never been easier. The Perfect English Grammar Workbook is a complete explanation of standard American English and an irreplaceable resource for students, ESL learners, and anyone else who's serious about mistake-free speaking and writing.

    From punctuation and prepositions to adverbs and abbreviations, this grammar workbook provides simple and straightforward guides to every part of English grammar. With classroom-style lessons you can practice your skills with dozens of helpful exercises. Afterwards, check your progress with comprehensive end-of-chapter quizzes.

    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook includes:

    Modern rules for modern writers—Make sure your skills are up to date with a grammar workbook featuring the latest rules for learning English.

    Focused lessons—Master grammar over the course of 17 chapters—each divided into individual sections so you can focus on one idea at a time.

    Exercises, quizzes, and more—This grammar workbook is filled with handy practice exercises and quizzes that will help you test what you've learned.

    Never misplace a comma again—The Perfect English Grammar Workbook makes it easy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 10, 2017
    ISBN9781623157975
    The Perfect English Grammar Workbook: Simple Rules and Quizzes to Master Today's English
    Author

    Lisa McLendon

    Lisa McLendon has three adult children and a granddaughter. She lives with her husband in Florida. Ansley Elizabeth and Her Perfectly Imperfect Star is her first book.

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      Book preview

      The Perfect English Grammar Workbook - Lisa McLendon

      INTRODUCTION

      As a linguist, an editor, and now a teacher—and a person who has loved words her whole life—I love taking language apart to see how it works, playing with it, and seeing what I can do with it. I spent years in graduate school studying Slavic languages and then more years in journalism; now I teach news editing at a university. I’m a total geek about grammar, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But I’m definitely not a grammar cop. I like the label grammar cheerleader a lot better, because grammar is a remarkable thing and a great tool for us, so we should give it a hearty hoorah from time to time.

      Having worked in both academia and journalism, I approach language from several points of view: scholar, writer, and reader. I recognize that living languages change, so grammar advice from a century or even a couple of decades ago may not still be applicable today. But I also recognize that when you’re trying to communicate clearly, with credibility and authority, there’s a set of current standards you need to follow so that readers focus on what you’re saying rather than how you’re saying it. (Anyone who’s ever made a typo on the Internet understands this.)

      Teaching has given me new insight on grammar, though: Many people are apprehensive about writing and public speaking because they’re not confident in their grammar skills. The fact that some guidebooks are complicated or snobby doesn’t help. So I’ve made it a priority to demystify grammar:

      It’s just a machine we all use already that occasionally has some tricky parts. Once you learn the tricky parts, you can use that machine like a pro.

      A poster in my office reads, Grammar is not a secret code. It is a code, sort of, but it’s certainly not a secret. Grammar is for everyone, and everyone deserves to feel confident using it. The bigger point is that I wrote this book not to scold, but to support. It’s for writers who want to learn more about language and how to use it according to current professional standards. Grammar doesn’t have to be confusing and it doesn’t have to be technical. It does take some practice—that’s what this book offers—and with practice, you’ll be perfect.

      How to Use This Book

      This book is designed to quickly explain grammar rules and guidelines and to give you practice with them. The individual topics are sorted into seventeen chapters, which you don’t have to do in order. In fact, you can skip around however you’d like. Search for something specific or browse the table of contents to see what you want to work on.

      Each topic includes a brief explanation and a few examples, and most have a practice exercise for you to try. At the end of each chapter, there’s a quiz that covers material from the whole chapter. The practice exercises and chapter quizzes are designed to make it fast and easy for you to check your work—all the answers are provided at the end of the book (here).

      Grammar is a big, broad subject, and a book of this type can’t cover it all. The topics in this book were chosen because they’re the most common areas where people get confused or make mistakes. For an easy-to-use reference guide, the original Perfect English Grammar handbook is a great choice (this book was written as a companion to it). For deeper or more comprehensive questions, consult the Further Reading section here.

      A note about Muphry’s Law (no, that’s not a typo): This law states that any given piece of writing that attempts to offer language advice or correct mistakes in language will itself contain an error. Everything has been done to present you with a perfect book about perfect grammar, but any time human beings are involved, there’s the possibility for error. I offer apologies in advance if a mistake slipped through.

      What Does This Book Mean by Perfect English Grammar?

      You might have heard the saying The perfect is the enemy of the good, meaning that if you fiddle with something too long to make it perfect, you’ll either never get it done or make a mess of it in the process. I like Vince Lombardi’s take better: We are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it … because in the process we will catch excellence.

      Even if we hit only excellent, perfect grammar is a good standard to aspire to—it opens doors for you academically and professionally, and it helps you communicate your information and ideas clearly. For the purposes of this book, I’m using a broader definition of grammar: not just morphology and syntax, but all the rules and guidelines that govern language use, including spelling, punctuation, and usage. We have to understand the rules before we know when and why to break them (yes, we do break them sometimes). You won’t want to blindly follow rules, but instead use them—or ignore them—to make your language clear and interesting.

      The guidelines in this book reflect standard American English—that is, the English that’s considered typical for an educated professional, the English you’ll see in books and magazines, the English you’ll hear on TV news and in the classroom. This doesn’t mean that other ways of speaking and writing are bad or less valid—they aren’t—it just means that if you’re writing and speaking professionally, you’ll probably want to follow this standard to reach a broad range of people and establish credibility with them.

      One other twist: Because living languages change, perfect grammar is going to be a moving target over the course of your life. Once you have a solid grounding in the fundamental parts of the language, though, you’ll be able to adjust easily and thoughtfully to changes as they come.

      Language is a wonderful thing: It lets us communicate and inform, entertain and enlighten. Grammar is what holds it all together and helps it all make sense. Grammar grows and changes with language. It bends to accommodate poets and philosophers and physicists.

      Grammar wasn’t invented by a few lofty scholars to trip everyone else up. The original speakers of language created grammar, bit by bit, and the users of language, through the ages, have shaped and altered it to meet our needs (and sometimes our whims). Just as language is an integral part of our lives, grammar is, too.

      But when grammar is ignored or confused, sentences come crashing down, paragraphs collapse, and meaning gets lost. Certainly sometimes people can figure out what you meant, even if it’s not what you said, but other times your communication fails. People are confused. They misunderstand. They get distracted. You’re not deliberately wasting breath or ink or bytes, but if you’re not being clear, you might as well be. And that’s why grammar is important: It makes language work. Remember that we control language—it doesn’t control us. Use grammar as your tool to control language and make it work exactly how you want it to.

      The good news is that you probably already know most of English grammar. If you’re a native speaker of English, you’ve been using grammar ever since you learned to talk. We all use it, every time we speak or write, usually without even thinking about it. It’s when we think about some parts of it that we start having doubts, which is why we have books like this one.

      Good enough is fine for text messages and website comments and casual conversation. But if you’re speaking or writing professionally, you want to give your teachers, bosses, clients, colleagues, and potential audiences better than good enough. Don’t all the people you communicate with deserve clear, clean, meaningful language? Perfect grammar won’t give you something to say, but it will help you say it in the best way possible.

      Although children pick up spoken language with ease, writing is a different skill, one that must be learned. And we’re not just talking about handwriting or typing, but composing sentences, paragraphs, and narratives. The rules are different for writing. There are plenty of constructions you can use in speech that won’t have the grammar police breaking down your door and carting you away, but when you write—if you want your ideas and information to be taken seriously—you’ll want to avoid them.

      This is a grammar workbook instead of a writing workbook, so we’re not really going to focus on the details of writing essays, reports, or research papers, but here are a few tips and some practice exercises all about the elements of good composition.

      2.1 General Writing Tips

      Clean, clear grammar is the foundation for solid writing. No matter how good your ideas are or how relevant your facts might be, if they are presented in a confusing way, readers won’t understand them. And if your content is presented through sloppy, scattered writing, readers won’t take it seriously.

      Writing is a craft. It takes work to get better, but with work you will get better. A good way to improve your writing is to read good examples of the kind of writing you’re working on, so you can get a feel for how it’s supposed to look.

      Writing is a process. Most people don’t just sit down and write something straight through. Instead, take it one step at a time: Think about your topic, gather information, organize your facts and your thoughts, write, revise, think some more, write some more, edit, and then format.

      Different kinds of writing call for different styles. And style means both word choice and sentence structure, as well as the formatting, spelling, and punctuation choices in a document. For example, journalism is written in a more conversational style, and it usually follows Associated Press style. Academic writing is in a more formal style and often follows American Psychological Association (APA) or Modern Language Association (MLA) style.

      2.2 Before You Begin

      First, figure out what your goal is. That is, why are you writing? Are you writing to inform? Enlighten? Persuade? Entertain? Explore?

      Then, figure out what your point is. Are you writing a news story about something that happened in your city? An analysis of imagery in a novel? A summary of research findings? An argument for or against

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