The Big Book of English Grammar

Over 500 pages8.5 x 11Bonus PDFOver 7 hours of bonus videoYes, purchasing The Big Book of English Grammar entitles you to over 7 hours of companion video—one video for each of the 37 chapters. The videos represent an abridged version of the book itself. To view some samples from the video series, go to https://differentdrummerpublishing.com/.Purchasing the book—whether on Kindle or in print—also entitles you to a PDF containing all of the book’s 224 exercises.For those who would like to use the material with students, the PDF is a collection of the exercises only. The answers to the exercises appear within the book—at the end of each chapter.Directions for accessing the bonus video and the bonus PDF are found in Appendix A.This book was once a series of 9 workbooks. It then morphed into a primary grammar book and 4 workbooks. This same material now appears in a single book, The Big Book of English Grammar. Those who just want to read the book as a course on grammar can, of course, skip the exercises. In the print version, the exercises appear at the end of each chapter; in the Kindle version, the exercises follow the matching explanatory material.The Big Book of English Grammar consists of 4 parts. In the first part, we study the parts of speech—English grammar at the level of the single word. In the second part we move from a word-level to a sentence-level study of subjects and verbs, run-ons and fragments, sentence patterns, and compound and complex sentences. In the third part we study the nine types of phrases that can be added to the sentence structures we studied previously. And in the fourth part we study punctuation—those little marks that serve as guides for our readers.Within the pages of The Big Book of English Grammar, we learn . . .how to create active sentences from passivehow to create intentional fragmentsthe four ways to create compound sentencescreating mirror-image sentences with semicolonsthe true meaning of the colon (which has little to do with lists)beginning a sentence with a conjunctionwhen to place a semicolon before a conjunction in a compound sentencethe conjunctive adverb “slide-to-the-right” trickhow to flip-flop complex sentences containing an adverbial subordinate clausehow to craft stylish sentences by adding words, phrases, and clauses to the three sentence-expansion slotsthe writing trick with objective relative pronounshow to reduce relative clauseshow to add variety to our listssentences in a serieswhen to use semicolons in listswhen to hyphenate and when to unhyphenate compound adjectivesdashes used as reverse-directional colonsIn addition, The Big Book of English Grammar includes a glossary of terms and a collection of lists.(Note that this book is written in American English. Note also that this book is not designed for English Language Learners at earlier stages of language learning.) Read more