Get some good grammar practice — and start speaking and writing well!
Good grammar is important, whether you want to advance your career, boost your GPA, or increase your SAT or ACT score. Practice is the key to improving your grammar skills, and that's what this workbook is all about. Open it and you'll find hundreds of fun problems to help build your grammar muscles. Just turn to a topic you need help with — from punctuation and pronouns to possessives and parallel structure — and get out your pencil. With just a little practice every day, you'll be speaking correctly, writing confidently, and getting the recognition you deserve at work or at school.
100s of Problems!
- Review grammar rules and exceptions
- Build grammar skills, from sentence mechanics to stylistic fine points
- Convey your ideas clearly and persuasively
- Speak and write with flair and confidence
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.
About the Author
Geraldine Woods began her education when teachers still supplied ink wells to their students. She credits her 35-year career as an English teacher to a set of ultra-strict nuns armed with thick grammar books. She lives in New York City, where with great difficulty she refrains from correcting signs containing messages such as "Bagel's for sale." She is the author of more than 40 books, including English Grammar For Dummies, Research Papers For Dummies, College Admission Essays For Dummies, and The SAT I Reasoning Test For Dummies.