Introduction

Welcome to Grammar Basics: Info and Exercises! This work in progress is an exercise in developing free, accessible textbooks for college and university students. I say “work in progress” because I hope that readers like you will use some of the information as it’s written in here, scrap the stuff that doesn’t interest you, and adapt the parts that can be improved with a little more imagination and revision. I expect that the content in here will shift over time; in fact, it already has!

So, what can a reader expect to see in this little book?

You’ll see a collection of explanations and exercises that teach the components of written language I find most useful for students enrolled in my first-year composition courses. For that reason, you might find some gaps or omissions. As time allows, I might fill in a few of those gaps, but I want to be mindful that grammar is a complex topic, and the longer a text is, the more likely it will overwhelm readers.

On that note, you’ll notice that the writing style is a little casual. It’s a choice I make when I teach writing — demystification is my goal — but it’s not for everyone, so if you’re looking for a precise, robust definition of grammatical terms, you’re out of luck. I hope, though, that some of the plain-language writing will match the needs of some of your students.

Regardless of your views on the writing itself, I think this textbook will offer value to students through interactive exercises. These exercises are peppered throughout the text, providing students opportunities to check their understanding quickly and easily.

Organization

The book begins with a section on parts of speech. We look at each in detail, and readers have some opportunities to practice identifying them in sentences.

After parts of speech, we move onto a section on sentences. Readers will learn about spotting subjects and verbs, identifying clauses, and combining clauses to make compound and complex sentences.

Following our work on sentences, we shift to sentence structure errors: comma splices, fused sentences, and fragments.

Next is a short section on subject-verb agreement, followed by discussions of passive voice and

The book closes with a section on some key punctuation. The focus is on commas, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes.

Further sections may appear in later iterations of the book.

Well, that’s the end of the introduction. It’s time to start learning!