Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)

By CG Wheeler

Need to brush up on your grammar and writing but don't want to be bored to death? Me either. This little book puts together clear, concise explanations behind grammar, in an entertaining way that I gleaned from over 10 years of teaching.

• Language: English
• Publisher: CG Wheeler
• Release date: Dec 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386988854

Book preview

Grammaring: Grammar With Style!

Introduction

When you think of reading a grammar handbook, it probably sounds about as exciting as organizing your sock drawer, going to the dentist, or cleaning the lint catcher out of your dryer. Over the last 15-20 years, I’ve read a number of books on writing, and while most of them are dry, wordy, or irrelevant, there are a few that have been really helpful (I’ll include them in the Appendix). My hope is that this handbook will be more on the helpful, even enjoyable, side. I taught writing at the college level for over eight years, during which time I taught over 100 writing classes, and have pared down some of the key concepts I’ve learned and used from these classroom experiences. I want to share them with you, and I hope you will find them helpful as you refresh or improve your own writing.

But first, before talking about grammar, I want you to be able to understand where grammar came from. Knowing this will give it a context, and create some helpful hooks to understand why grammar is important and what it does.

If you were to pick up a scroll from the beginning of the Common Era (books, or codexes weren’t popular yet), you would notice that the words were all in capital letters, with no gaps between them, and there was no punctuation to show you when you had come to the end of a sentence or thought (the Romans were beginning to play with markers that would show sentence breaks, but this hadn’t caught on yet). Reading a text this way could get very confusing really quickly. There’s something else: only 5-10% of the population in the ancient world could actually read. If you were one of the lucky few, you would be called upon to read out loud (I see that hand!). Reading was a public, social event. You would take your scroll home, practice reading through it a few times on your own, reading out loud as you went, and then you would come back to the social gathering and read it again OUT LOUD to your audience (no whispering here, and no microphones, just good hillside acoustics). Talk about a performance! All the non-verbals, the vocal inflection, pauses, stops, etc. would be up to you, The Reader, to insert into the text.

About 400 years later, that began to change. The Irish monks, when transcribing scrolls, began to insert markers to tell the reader where to pause, and provided clues about which words went together and which ones began a new thought.

Now, let’s skip forward to some modern day examples. In conversation, over half of how we communicate is not just in the words we use, but in the non-verbals (our facial expression, body language, tone of voice, inflection), so a lot of the meaning can be lost in translation when we have only the text—just the words on the page—to go on.

So here’s why grammar is important. Bringing grammar and punctuation into the writing helps make writing clearer and less confusing. In other words, grammar and mechanics are not only important for good communication, but they are a significant part of the communication. They bring the non-verbals we rely on in spoken conversation more into play in the written word.

Now that I’ve talked through some of the background of where grammar and punctuation came from, I hope you’ll agree that communicating well is important, and since grammar is part of what brings meaning into our communication, that it’s important that we do it well, too.

For the rest of the handbook, I’ve included a section on some of the most common errors (arranged alphabetically). I’ve also included a Table of Contents to help with the referencing. The handbook is designed as a reference guide for you to refer to so you can refresh key grammatical concepts as you’re composing an email, a design board, or putting together a presentation.

In addition, I’ve included an Appendix with more conceptual aspects of writing that I’ve found to be helpful in the classroom and in working with tutoring students or business clients. Please feel free to refer to these as well.

Above all, I hope this handbook is helpful as you work to communicate well and grow in confidence as a writer. I’d love to hear from you with any feedback. Please feel free to email me at [e-mail] with any comments, questions, or clarifications.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I. Lessons in Grammar

Agreement

Apostrophes

Capitalization

Colons

Commas

Comma Splices

Dashes

Fragments

Hyphens

Pronouns

Quotations

Run-On Sentences

Semicolons

Spelling

Wrong or Missing Words

Part 2. Appendix

Bibliography of Good Writing Books

Active vs. Passive Voice (How to be Clear and Concise)

Characters and Action

Coherence and Cohesion

Style

Hedging

Parts of Speech

Writing as a House

Agreement

Agreement is an important way to bring consistency to your writing. Whenever I think of agreement, and often when I’ve taught students, I remember watching Sesame Street as a kid. The show would have a game where one of these things was not like the others. They would show a picture of a baseball, a basketball, a football, and a vase of flowers. Now, which one of these didn’t belong? I wonder . . .

Yep, you guessed it, the vase of flowers. Agreement is like this, too, in that you want consistency in your perspective. It comes into play in three primary areas: number, person, and tense. We’ll talk about all three.

Number

First, we’ll talk about number—one, or more than one. It sounds pretty straightforward at first glance. If you have a singular subject (noun), then you need a singular verb. If you have a plural subject, then you need a plural verb.  Here are some examples:

Mark picks flowers every spring and takes them to his mother.

In this sentence, Mark is the subject or character, there’s just one of him, and he picks and takes (verbs).

The flowers smell nice and brighten the room with their assortment of color.

This time we have a plural subject (flowers) and plural verbs (smell, brighten). We wouldn’t say smells or brightens in this case because we’re talking about more than one.

With singular verbs, often a good clue that it’s singular is that it ends in s (in present tense, anyway). This is the opposite for nouns. A number of plural nouns end in s, while with verbs, it’s often the singular verbs that end in s. This doesn’t apply to every case, but is a common pattern.

Here’s