Everyday Grammar

Grammar is a strange thing. Many fully literate people get through life without the slightest idea of what it is - and yet the moment it becomes the subject of serious study, it turns into a hot political issue.

This book will teach you the essentials and help you to pick your way through the minefield. The first part is an explanation of the basics of grammar - starting from simple sentences and breaking them down into their constituent parts - clause, phrase, word, morpheme. There is then a description of the building block items - nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs - plus an account of how and why they can be used to make meaningful statements.


This all becomes more complex as you move along, and the first part of the book ends appropriately enough with a chapter called building texts. Here there is direct advice on improving your writing skills - largely by paying close attention to the way words can be used to subtly guide readers through what you are writing.

The second part of the book is a glossary of grammatical terms and usage - very well illustrated with examples. Diagrams break down passages of text, giving explanations on sentence construction.

It's impossible to avoid some of the specialist jargon of linguists in all this - though I wonder if beginners really need to know about 'anaphoric deixis'. Fortunately it's generally kept under restraint, and John Seely strikes a diplomatic compromise between traditional prescriptive grammar which thought English ought to follow the grammatical rules of Latin, and the modern theorists who often seem to suggest that anything goes.

This is a book which is suitable for both language students and the general reader. It aims to demystify and explain these terms, while giving advice on how to construct sentences. And if you think that studying words in detail, down to the level of morphemes (child+ren) is not important - then think again. This is about to become part of the government's official Literacy Strategy for schools in the UK.