English Grammar For Dummies
Overview
Get the last word on English grammar
Grasping the intricacies of the English language doesn't need to be tricky, and this down-to-earth guide breaks everything down in ways that make sense—Revealing rules, tips, and tricks to eliminate confusion and gain clarity, English Grammar For Dummies gives you everything you need to communicate with confidence!
Good grammar lays the foundation for speaking and writing clearly. This easy-to-follow book will help you become a more articulate, effective communicator. Covering everything from the building blocks of a sentence to those pesky rules of punctuation, it offers the practical guidance you need to communicate in a way that would make any English teacher proud.
- Improve your speaking skills
- Clearly compose written communications
- Get the latest techniques for continuous improvement
- Write a winning college entrance exam or compelling business presentation
Stop worrying about the grammar police and become more confident with your words!
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About The Author
Geraldine Woods has more than 35 years of teaching experience. She is the author of more than 50 books, including English Grammar Workbook For Dummies and Research Papers For Dummies.
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english grammar for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
Whether you’re engaging in everyday speech or writing the perfect paper, you need to be familiar with the various parts of English grammar. Knowing how to correctly use nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and punctuation as well as how to properly structure a sentence can make or break a good grade or a professional presentation.
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If you ever found an error — not a little error, but a big one, an embarrassing one — after you pressed the Send button, you need to check out this list. Here are ten tricks to improve that all-important final check.
Reread
Okay, this one sounds obvious, but it's far too easy to send something off, especially a text or a tweet, without checking it for both content and grammar.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Helping verbs change the meaning of a sentence by adding a sense of duty, probability, willingness, and so forth. Concentrate on the italicized verbs in these examples. All are add-ons, or helping verbs. The main verbs appear in bold type. Notice how the meaning changes:
Rita may attend the party. Her boss might be there.
Just as you need to guard against fakes (Rolexes, designer handbags) when you're on the city streets, you need to guard against fake subject–verb pairs.
Finding fake verbs
Verbs in English grammar can be a little sneaky sometimes. You may ask who? or what? in front of a verb and get no answer or at least no answer that makes sense.
Most joining words fly solo. Single words — and, but, nor, or, because, although, since, and so on — join sentences or parts of sentences. Some joining words, however, come in pairs. (In grammarspeak, joining words are called conjunctions. Double conjunctions are called correlatives. Forget these facts immediately!
Grammar & Vocabulary
You've probably noticed that some verbs are single words and others are made up of several words. The extra words are called helping verbs. They don't carry out the trash or dust the living room, but they do help the main verb express meaning, usually changing the time, or tense, of the action.Helping verbs often signal when the action or state of being is occurring.
Some sentences, usually commands, appear to be without a subject. For example, what do the following sentences have in common? "Sit still." "Eat your vegetables." "Clean your room."Yes, they're all nagging comments you've heard all your life. More importantly, they're all commands. The verbs give orders: sit, eat, clean.
Action verbs express — surprise! — action. No action verb needs a complement to be grammatically legal. Indirect objects are one type of complement that follows action verbs and enhance the meaning of the subject-verb pair.Imagine that you're holding a baseball, ready to throw it to your friend. In your fantasy, you're facing a Hall-of-Fame hitter.
Whether you’re engaging in everyday speech or writing the perfect paper, you need to be familiar with the various parts of English grammar. Knowing how to correctly use nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and punctuation as well as how to properly structure a sentence can make or break a good grade or a professional presentation.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Someone or something must be present in a sentence, and that someone or something doing the action or being talked about is the subject. Verbs are the words that express the action the subject is doing or the state of being the subject is in. Subjects and verbs must agree if you’re going to get your point across as clearly as possible.
What time is it? You can find out by checking a clock, your watch, your phone, or a verb. Surprised by that last one? Verbs express states of being (what is, was, or will be) and action (what someone or something does, did, or will do). In other words, a verb is a part of speech that expresses time, which grammarians call tense.
Though indirect objects seldom appear, you can check for them with a "pop the question." After you locate the action verb, the subject, and the direct object, ask
To whom? For whom?To what? For what?
If you get an answer, it should reveal an indirect object. Here's an example:
Mildred will tell me the gossip.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Because verbals are partly made up of verbs, they have tenses, just as verbs do. In other words, verbals express time. Here, you put verbals on the timeline.
Simultaneous events
Verbals often show up when two events take place at the same time. In the following sentences, check out the italicized verbals. Also keep your eye on the main verb, which is underlined.
To find adjectives, go to the words they describe — nouns and pronouns. Start with the noun or pronoun and ask three questions. (Not "What's the new hot app?" or "Did you see Will's new profile photo?" This is grammar, not life.) Here are the three questions:
How many?
Which one?
What kind?
Take a look at this sentence:
George posted three new photos on his favorite website.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Learning how to write an address on an envelope is a good skill to master. However, often times, people incorrectly use commas and other punctuation in addresses and dates, which can throw things off, including the postal service! While commas are good, all-purpose separators, they should be used properly for an accurate and professional piece of writing or envelope.
Grammar & Vocabulary
The rule for comparisons here is very simple: Use the word other or else when comparing someone or something to other members of the same group. Check out the following examples:
WRONG: The star soprano of the Santa Lola Opera, Sarah Screema, sings more loudly than anyone in the cast.WHY IT'S WRONG: The sentence makes it clear that Sarah is in the cast, but the comparison implies that she's not in the cast.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Comparisons are a part of life, and they're a part of grammar also — a part that writers often get wrong. Here, you find out how to create proper comparisons. Following is an incomplete comparison:
Octavia screamed more chillingly.
Do you understand the meaning of this comparison? Take a look at these possible scenarios:
Octavia screamed more chillingly.
Here's a little trick for pinpointing the subject–verb pair of a sentence: Pop the question! Pop the question tells you what to ask in order to find out what you want to know. The correct question is all important in the search for information, as all parents realize.
WRONG QUESTION FROM PARENT: What did you do last night?
A scientific study by a blue-ribbon panel of experts found that 90 percent of all the errors in a sentence occurred because the verb was misidentified. Okay, there was no study. But it is true that when you try to crack a sentence, you should always start by identifying the verb. To find the verb, read the sentence and ask two questions:
What's happening?
Every time you write or speak, you use nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and other parts of the English language. Knowing how to use these parts of speech can help you speak more eloquently, write more clearly, and feel more confident when communicating with others.
Noun: names a person, place, thing, idea (Lulu, jail, cantaloupe, loyalty, and so on)
Pronoun: takes the place of a noun (he, who, I, what, and so on)
Verb: expresses action or being (scrambled, was, should win, and so on)
Adjective: describes a noun or pronoun (messy, strange, alien, and so on)
Adverb: describes a verb, adjective, or other adverb (willingly, woefully, very, and so on)
Preposition: relates a noun or a pronoun to another word in the sentence (by, for, from, and so on)
Conjunction: ties two words or groups of words together (and, after, although, and so on)
Interjection: expresses strong emotion (yikes!
Grammar & Vocabulary
Dozens and dozens of English verbs have irregular past tense forms, as well as irregular past participles. If you are studying English grammar, you may want to memorize the common irregular past and past participles listed here. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but these are common verbs English speakers use every day.
Can you imagine what a sentence without any punctuation would be like? Without proper punctuation, it would be unreadable. Knowing when and how to use the period, comma, colon, semicolon, and other punctuation marks will make your writing smoother and more understandable.
Endmarks: All sentences need an endmark: a period, question mark, exclamation point, or ellipsis.
Prepositions never travel alone; they're always with an object. Just to get all the annoying terminology over with at once, a prepositional phrase consists of a preposition and an object. The object of a preposition is always a noun or a pronoun, or perhaps one or two of each. (A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun, such as him for Raymond, it for hotel, and so forth.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Learning grammar in the 21st century is irrelevant because grammar-checking apps, autocorrect functions, and word-processing programs make human knowledge obsolete. Right? Wrong!English has a half million words, and you can arrange those words trillions of ways. No app or device can catch all of your mistakes, and many programs identify errors that aren't actually wrong.
The Beatles sang of “I, Me, Mine,” but understanding pronouns takes a little practice. Pronouns can be objective or subjective, and can show possession. You, me, him, her, them, us . . . everyone can speak and write more clearly by understanding pronouns.
Pronouns that may be used only as subjects or subject complements: I, he, she, we, they, who, whoever.
Grammar & Vocabulary
He told I? He told me? Me, of course. Your ear usually tells you which pronouns to use as objects (both direct and indirect) because the wrong pronouns sound funny. The object pronouns include me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, and whomever. Check them out in context:
Rickie splashed her with icy water.The cobra hissed them a warning.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Do alligators live in city sewers? Yes? You may be vulnerable to all sorts of myths, including some that concern grammar — ten, to be exact. Here are "rules" that never existed, as well as a couple that have passed their expiration date.
To not split an infinitive
In Latin and many other languages, an infinitive is a single word, the "family name" of a group of verb forms.
Does everyone love grammar? Don't answer that! That sentence illustrates the subject's favorite location in a question. Most questions in English are formed by adding a helping verb — do, does, will, can, should, and so forth — to a main verb. The subject is generally tucked between the helping verb and the main verb, but you don't have to bother remembering that fascinating bit of trivia.
All sentences contain verbs — words that express action or state of being. But you can't have an action in a vacuum. You can't have a naked, solitary state of being either. Someone or something must also be present in the sentence — the who or what you're talking about in relation to the action or state of being expressed by the verb.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Some clauses are like mature grown-ups. They have their own house or apartment, pay their own expenses, and wash the dishes frequently enough to ward off a visit from the health inspector. These clauses have made a success of life; they're independent.Other clauses are like the brother-in-law character in a million jokes.
Most of the sentences you encounter are in the normal subject–verb order, which is (surprise!) subject–verb. In other words, the subject usually comes before the verb. Not every sentence follows that order, though most do. Sometimes a subject hides out at the end of the sentence or in some other weird place. (Hey, even a subject needs a change of scenery sometime.
Grammar & Vocabulary
Loyalty in grammar relates to what grammarians call person. In first person, the subject narrates the story: In other words, I or we acts as the subject of the sentence. In second person, the subject is being spoken to, and you (either singular or plural) is the subject. In third person, the subject is being spoken about, using he, she, it, they, or any other word that talks about someone or something.
Besides showing the action or state of being in the sentence, the verb also indicates the time the action or “being” took place. By learning about the different kinds of simple, perfect, past, and present tenses, your speaking and writing will be clear and concise.
Simple present tense: tells what is happeni
Grammar & Vocabulary
Not surprisingly, you use present tense for actions that are currently happening. But (surprise!) you may also use present tense for some actions that happened a long time ago and for some actions that never happened at all. The historical present is a way to write about history or literature:
On December 7, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tells the nation about the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The word done is never a verb all by itself. A true party animal, this verb form insists on being accompanied by helping verbs. In grammarspeak, which you do NOT have to learn, done is a past participle of the verb to do. Naked, shivering, totally alone participles, such as done, never function as verbs. Here are some examples:
WRONG: He done all he could, but the sky fell anyway.
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