English Grammar Beginner Guide

Comprehensive guide English grammar guide for beginners

Why should you study English? Do you speak and write English? That’s reason enough. When you speak or write, you present yourself to others, and if you care at all about how you’re perceived—and who doesn’t?—you care about how your use of language represents you. Certainly, not all jobs depend exclusively upon writing and speaking skills, but most do to some significant extent. If you are in school, your teachers have probably set a standard for written and spoken English.

As you begin English Grammar Simplified, get ready for a different learning experience. English Grammar Simplified will help you better understand and use the English language, but you will find that this app takes a different approach from the usual English improvement text. You will learn the basics of English grammar with a thorough overview of the parts of speech and punctuation and capitalization rules. The next part of the app builds on these skills, giving you sound advice on mastering proper sentence structure and refining your writing. The latter part covers important spelling and word usage skills.

In support of all of these concepts, you will also find great emphasis on finding common errors. In other words, this is not simply a grammar app. Rather, this app identifies where errors are most commonly made—so you can avoid them. You may, for example, know the definition of a pronoun (i.e., a word that takes the place of a noun), but you may not recognize one of the most common pronoun errors. Read the following sentence:

This app includes:

PART ONE ALL ABOUT THE ENGLISH SENTENCE

CHAPTER 1 The Essential Elements of the English Sentence

Subject and Verb

Sentence Fragments and Run-Ons

Time and Number: Agreement Between Subject and Verb

Perfect Verb Tenses

Irregular Verbs

CHAPTER 2 Introduction to the Parts of Speech

Parts of Speech

Nouns

Verbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Pronouns

Prepositions

Conjunctions

Interjections

Articles

CHAPTER 3 More About Verbs, Prepositions, and Pronouns

Perfect Tenses

Prepositional Phrases

More About Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

Mirror Pronouns

Relative Pronouns

Who, Whom, That, or Which?

Demonstrative Pronouns

Indefinite Pronouns

PART TWO ALL ABOUT PUNCTUATION AND CAPITALIZATION

CHAPTER 4 Punctuation: End Marks and Commas

Brief History of Punctuation

Period

Question Mark

Exclamation Point

Comma

CHAPTER 5 More About Punctuation

Semicolon

Quotation Marks

Colon

Apostrophe

Dash and Hyphen

Parentheses and Brackets

CHAPTER 6 Capitalization

Brief History of the Alphabet and Capitalization

Modern Rules of Capitalization

PART THREE MASTERING GOOD SENTENCE STRUCTURE

CHAPTER 7 Building Better Sentences

Building Balanced Sentences

Creating Well-Connected Sentences

Trimming Unnecessary Words from Sentences

CHAPTER 8 Punctuation Builds Sentences

Punctuation in Sentence Building

Simple Sentences

Compound Sentences

Complex Sentences

Compound-Complex Sentences

CHAPTER 9 Style and Clarity

Writing Clearer Sentences

Using Active Verbs

Placing Important Information Last

Using Verbs Instead of Nouns

Avoiding Unclear Pronoun References

Placing Descriptive Words Correctly

Deleting Unnecessary Words

Correcting Illogical Statements

Writing Balanced Sentences—a Reminder

Using Prepositions Correctly in a Series

PART FOUR SPELLING AND WORD USAGE SKILLS

CHAPTER 10 Proven Techniques to Improve Spelling

Who Needs Help with Spelling?

Techniques for Improving Spelling Skills

Helpful Spelling Rules—or Not

Becoming a Better Speller

CHAPTER 11 Correct Word Usage

Easily Confused Words: Homonyms, Homophones, and Homographs

Incorrectly Used Words and Phrases

Words That Sound Almost Alike but Have Different Meanings