Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)
    Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)
    Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)
    Ebook102 pages2 hours

    Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)

    By CG Wheeler

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCG Wheeler
    Release dateDec 28, 2018
    ISBN9781386988854
    Grammaring: The Art of Grammar (With Style!)

    Related to Grammaring

    Related ebooks

    Professional Skills For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Editing For Grammar

      Mar 20, 2019

      Although most writers and editors have received extensive training in written English, we still make mistakes—all the time. The Careful Writer, Words into Type, The Elements of Style and other sources offer voluminous instruction and examples for wr

      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The 1970s And Now: Inflation, An Unbalanced Economy, And Tough Choices

      Jul 25, 2022

      From the grocery store to the electronics retailer to the car dealership, Americans ask the same question: When will inflation go back down to normal? The answer is hard, frustratingly so, because the economy looks and acts a lot like a playground se

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The_ten_ Steps_ To_going_ Electric

      Apr 23, 2020

      Even the cheapest electric cars are still quite expensive. Of course, there are deals to be had, but usually EVs are a few grand dearer to buy outright, or about £100 per month more on PCP than a comparable internal combustion-powered car. However, y

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Writer’s Field Guide to Editors

      Feb 3, 2020

      Spend enough time in the freelance trenches, and you’ll find yourself working for an eclectic array of editors. If you’re lucky, the majority will be talented individuals who have your best interests at heart, work hard on your behalf, and use their

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Top Tips For B2B Video Marketing

      Oct 14, 2018

      For too long, video marketing has belonged to the realm of B2C. No more. Video has undoubtedly become the most compelling way marketers can humanise their storytelling and amp up their emotional engagement with their audiences. B2B marketers have tra

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Welcome

      Dec 1, 2022

      As writers, most of us dream of being discovered. When our writing finds agents, publishers, and most importantly readers, it validates us. All our efforts, from the beginning of the creative process to its culmination with our words in the pages of

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      About Branding

      Mar 23, 2020

      Branding is both a complex and exciting subject. Regardless of a farmer’s size or status, decisions about branding should be taken with great care. Branding plays a major role in making a product easily recognisable. When scores of farmers are all se

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Guest List

      Apr 5, 2021

      A graduate of the Harvard School of Business, a director of the Bank of the Philippine Islands and of Roxas and Company Inc, president of the Management Association of the Philippines, as well as the vice chairman of the Philippine Business for Educa

      1 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mailchamp

      Feb 1, 2018

      Mailchamp
      13 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lighten Up! How to Weave Humor Into Serious Writing

      Oct 9, 2023

      Writing humor as a genre—a satiric story or novel, a laugh-outloud memoir or essay—is a broad topic, deserving exploration beyond the bounds of this column. But what if you’re writing serious, sorrowful, or scary fiction or nonfiction? A personal ess

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Older In The Mfa

      Aug 14, 2024

      TEN years ago, when I began a full-time MFA program, the first person I met in my cohort was the writer Laura Villareal. We shared an office as well as a name. We both taught composition, and we had the same teaching mentor, who mistook us for each o

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How English Conquered The World

      Aug 24, 2022

      Here’s something that Britain is good at: English. I’m not talking about oratory, novels or even Shakespeare. I’m referring to English as the world’s dominant lingua franca. In achieving this role, it has become ‘an economic skill, a marketable commo

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Write To Order

      Sep 11, 2021

      Write To Order
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How to Ask Better Questions

      Sep 1, 2018

      Karen Christensen: Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I knew that, I could solve the problem in less than

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Charlotte Rixon

      Feb 2, 2023

      'Id always wanted to be a writer, ever since I could read. I loved reading and making up stories and it just felt completely natural to write my own. It was very instinctual, rather ‘ than a conscious decision. ‘I wrote several “novels” as a child, a

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Writing Your First Article

      Sep 18, 2019

      After all your hard work and writing the perfect query, you now have an article writing assignment. The editor has detailed the word count, deadline, the rights, and the payment, and now it’s time to write the article. Keep in mind everything you kno

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Year in Reading: Shanthi Sekaran

      Dec 19, 2017

      You know when your friend writes a play or belts out a song or makes a working beehive out of marzipan and you’re like, “Oh, good God”? I read most of this novel sitting stick-straight, my mouth agape, quietly cursing. The post A Year in Reading: Sha

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Ideas To Help Polish Your Writing

      Aug 3, 2023

      For many people, ‘Give me a vowel’ will bring up an instant reference to the TV programme Countdown. In the context of the game show, vowels and consonants were linked to letters of the alphabet, with A-E-I-O-U being vowels and the other 21 letters c

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      STYLE: Dig Out Your Prose

      Apr 4, 2024

      STYLE: Dig Out Your Prose
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How to, Like, Speak Better

      May 2, 2023

      How to, Like, Speak Better
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Finding Your Voice

      Nov 7, 2024

      Finding Your Voice
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Music Of Language

      Jun 19, 2019

      Words can make magic. Skillfully put together into sentences, words can transfer ideas and images from a writer’s mind into the minds of readers—that, by itself, is powerful verbal magic. When we exploit the musical characteristics of language, we ca

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Grammaring

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Grammaring - CG Wheeler

      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 [email protected] 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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1