Part I: Getting Down to Basics: The Parts of the Sentence 7

Chapter 1: I Already Know How to Talk. Why Should I Study Grammar? 9

Chapter 2: Verbs: The Heart of the Sentence 17

Chapter 3: Relax! Understanding Verb Tense 29

Chapter 4: Who's Doing What? How to Find the Subject 43

Chapter 5: Having It All: The Complete Sentence 55

Chapter 6: Handling Complements 73

Part II: Avoiding Common Errors 83

Chapter 7: Do You Feel Bad or Badly? The Lowdown on Adjectives and Adverbs 85

Chapter 8: Small Words, Big Trouble: Prepositions 101

Chapter 9: Everyone Brought Their Homework: Pronoun Errors 109

Chapter 10: Just Nod Your Head: About Agreement 121

Part III: No Garage, but Plenty of Mechanics 135

Chapter 11: Punctuation Law That Should Be Repealed: Apostrophes 137

Chapter 12: Quotations: More Rules Than the Internal Revenue Service 151

Chapter 13: The Pause That Refreshes: Commas 169

Chapter 14: Useful Little Marks: Dashes, Hyphens, and Colons 185

Chapter 15: CAPITAL LETTERS 195

Chapter 16: New Media, New Grammar Rules 207

Part IV: Polishing Without Wax — The Finer Points of Grammar 219

Chapter 17: Pronouns and Their Cases 221

Chapter 18: Fine-Tuning Verbs 235

Chapter 19: Saying What You Want to Say: Descriptive Words and Phrases 253

Chapter 20: Good, Better, Best: Comparisons 265

Chapter 21: Parallels Without the Lines 281

Part V: Rules Even Your Great-Aunt's Grammar Teacher Didn't Know 295

Chapter 22: The Last Word on Verbs 297

Chapter 23: The Last Word on Pronouns 309

Chapter 24: The Last Word on Sentence Structure 323

Part VI: The Part of Tens 343

Chapter 25: Ten Ways Two to Improve Your Proofreading 345

Chapter 26: Ten Ways to Learn Better Grammar 349

Index 353