By: Geraldine Woods Publisher: For Dummies Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: For Dummies Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 384 Publication Date: July 15, 2001
Product Description: A few years ago, a magazine sponsored a contest for the comment most likely to end a conversation. The winning entry? "I teach English grammar." Just throw that line out at a party; everyone around you will clam up or start saying "whom."
Why does grammar make everyone so nervous? Probably because English teachers, for decades – no, for centuries – have been making a big deal out of grammar in classrooms, diagramming sentences and drilling the parts of speech, clauses, and verbals into students until they beg for mercy. Happily, you don't have to learn all those technical terms of English grammar – and you certainly don't have to diagram sentences – in order to speak and write correct English.
So rest assured – English Grammar For Dummies will probably never make your English teacher's top-ten list of must-read books, because you won't have to diagram a single sentence. What you will discover are fun and easy strategies that can help you when you're faced with such grammatical dilemmas as the choice between "I" and "me," "had gone" and "went," and "who" and "whom." With English Grammar For Dummies, you won't have to memorize a long list of meaningless rules (well, maybe a couple in the punctuation chapter!), because when you understand the reason for a particular word choice, you'll pick the correct word automatically.
English Grammar For Dummies covers many other topics as well, such as the following:
Verbs, adjectives, and adverbs – oh my!
Preposition propositions and pronoun pronouncements
Punctuation: The lowdown on periods, commas, colons, and all those other squiggly marks
Possession: It's nine-tenths of grammatical law
Avoiding those double negative vibes
How to spice up really boring sentences (like this one)
Top Ten lists on improving your proofreading skills and ways to learn better grammar
Just think how improving your speaking and writing skills will help you in everyday situations, such as writing a paper for school, giving a presentation to your company's big wigs, or communicating effectively with your family. You will not only gain the confidence in knowing you're speaking or writing well, but you'll also make a good impression on those around you!
Grammar help This was very helpful. I have been out of school a long time and this refreshed my memory. Thank you
Very helpful good layout and helpful to young and old so if a student and you need help get this book and the dummies grammar workbook and not expensive either to get you to do well in school or as for me just a refresh from 30+ yrs ago since I am not writing so much in my older age.
Easy to Understand - Great Practice This book was great! Very clear, easy to understand refresher of correct grammar practice. I bought the workbook so I could do the exercises and I'm so glad I did. This book was a very inexpensive investment with tons of valuable information. I highly recommend it!
muddled attempt at an accessible and engaging grammar workbook Though the earnestness and hard work of the author are evident throughout "English Grammar Workbook for Dummies," the glibness and zaniness of the book's explanations and exercises undermine the book's effectiveness. Like many other texts in the "...for Dummies" series, this book uses a playful voice and an excess of random, silly jokes in an attempt to make the subject matter more accessible and engaging. The result is a mostly unfunny, overlong workbook that obscures its own points with needlessly dumbed-down terminology and random attempts at humor--making "English Grammar for Dummies" the grammar-book equivalent of a wacky, PG-rated morning talk show. The hands-on learning parts of the text--the exercises--are especially problematic. Sacrificing directness and clarity for funniness and off-beat charm, the exercises are full of "problem" sentences that are so strangely constructed, it's difficult for one to know how to correct them with any precision or confidence (and the answer keys are not very reassuring). This book will be of little use to advanced English speakers/writers, and it's hard to imagine that it could give most beginners anything more than a hazy understanding of English language mechanics and grammar rules, the correct terminology for which they'll have learn later, elsewhere.
Very Complete, for an introductory book! Most self-help grammar books out there give you about a dozen rules of thumb to follow, without actually teaching you anything about grammar. Those books suck, because you can not apply what you learn to more than the 12 instances that are perfectly similar to an examples given. This book is different. It actually teaches you grammatical rules, so you can apply what you learn. I think it is the best introductory self-help grammar book out there.
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