English Grammar For Dummies

Learn to: Get down to basics with the rules of English grammar Improve your writing and verbal communication skills Brush up on your proofreading abilities Improve your academic performance and results From basic sentence construction to rules even your English teacher didn't know - conquer English grammar the fun, easy way Petrified at the prospect of tripping over tenses when it really matters? Draw a blank over the difference between who and whom, a clause and a phrase, a colon and a semicolon? Don't sweat it; English grammar is much easier to master than your teachers led you to believe - especially with this book as your guide. Plain-English explanations and loads of lively examples and exercises quickly get you up to speed on all the rules, terms and parts of speech, and, more importantly, how to use them properly to boost your speaking and writing skills. Make your future perfect perfect - learn to keep your tenses straight, your cases kosher, your singulars and plurals in line, and avoid pronoun gender-bending Objectify your prepositions - find out when it's appropriate to use 'I' or 'me', 'who' or 'whom', and when it's okay to end a sentence with a preposition and when it isn't Punctuate perfectly, every time! - discover simple tricks for knowing when to use a comma or a semicolon, a colon or a period and to avoid overdoing it with exclamation points! Know when to 'when' and when not to - never again be confused about whether to use single or double quotation marks, or none at all NEVER COMMIT A CAPITAL OFFENCE - you'll never have a doubt about whether to capitalise words and phrases or to use lowercase spellings Know when 'ain't' is okay and when it is not - discover valuable rules to guide you so you always know when it's fine to slangify your speech and writing, and when only formal English will do Open the book and find: The parts of a sentence and how they fit together The rules of verbs and prepositions Priceless pointers on how to polish your speaking and writing skills The latest techniques for improving your command of grammar Grammatical rules of the road for emailing, texting and blogging Simple strategies for keeping your tenses in order Useful rules even your teacher didn't know about Help for speakers or writers of any skill level