The Little Green Grammar Book

The Little Green Grammar Book
by Mark Tredinnick
Paperback: 256 pages
Published: (Reprint edition) September 1, 2008
ISBN-10: 0868409197
ISBN-13: 978-0868409191

What really goes on inside a sentence? What is your subject, and where is your verb, and what is its tense, and where is your modifier, and why does it matter? Where do you need a comma, and where do you not? Why are dashes and semicolons so misunderstood? When is it which and when is it that? In The Little Green Grammar Book, Mark Tredinnick asks and answers the tough grammar questions—big and small—with the same verve and authority readers encountered in The Little Red Writing Book. The Little Green Grammar Book does for grammar what The Little Red Writing Book did for style. It will have you writing like a writer in no time.

Contents:

Prologue: The rules for paradise
What grammar is and why you need it and how you master it
Part 1 A natural history of the sentence
Sentence grammar, parts of speech, phrases, clauses and sentence types
1 The inner life of sentences
2 Who does what how
3 Word order
4 The declarative sentence and its moody friends
5 The sum of the parts
6 Communities of words— phrases and clauses
7 The families of phrase
8 The five canonical clauses
9 A brief history of dependency— dependent clauses and their uses
10 The four sentence structures
Part 2 Everyday Metamorphoses
Verbs, nouns and pronouns and how they change shape; and a bit more about determiners
1 The taxonomy of verbs, nouns and pronouns
2 Verbs
3 Nouns
4 Pronouns
5 Determiners
Part 3 Keeping the pieces apart
The uses of punctuation
1 ‘Trip 9s’
2 different kinds of silence
3 The full stop (.)
4 The comma (,)
5 The colon ,(:)
6 The semicolon (;)
7 The dash (—)
8 The hyphen (-)
9 The apostrophe (’)
10 The question mark (?)
11 The exclamation mark (!)
12 Quotation marks (‘ ’; “ ”)
13 brackets, parentheses, braces ([ ], ( ), { })
14 The ellipsis (…)
Part 4 Twenty-one grammar gaffes and how to avoid them
Common grammar problems and their silutions
Introduction—just between you and I
1 Working as an escort in a documentary— dangling modifiers
2 She said she had stolen her seashells— loose pronoun reference
3 Where have all the commas gone— and, while we’re at it, the hyphens? Put commas back where they belong
4 Starting a walk with a limp— put a comma after however, where you mean but (or use but)
5 They all, ran wild— random and errant commas
6 Commuted sentences—comma splices, fused sentences and sentence fragments
7 There’s too many subjects here— if your subject is plural, your verb must be, too
8 A hundred words or fewer— the difference between less and fewer
9 Peter admires us both; he admires her and me; just between you and me— the case of compound pronouns
10 Whom should i see about this?— when it should be who and when it should be whom
11 Please write to myself— the misuses of the reflexive pronoun
12 ‘The his’er problem’—gendered pronouns
13 We’re going on a which hunt— which versus that
14 It’s a possessive, isn’t it? It’s or its?
15 Thomas’s apostrophes—not every noun that ends in s drops the s that normally follows the apostrophe in the possessive
16 Dodging bullets—don’t use semicolons (or any other piece of punctuation) between bullet points; don’t use semicolons to intro
17 She’s meaner than i; he knows more than i; she likes him more than me
18 And in the beginning—you may begin a sentence with and. But or Because
19 Up with which i will not put; to boldly go— end with prepositions; split your infinitives
20 Brian’s conducting was the eighth wonder of the world—possessive form of the pronoun before a gerund
21 ‘I think he said, “I’ll come tomorrow”’—It’s okay to switch tense, but not by mistake
Epilogue Learn the rules; forget the rules
References
Dictionaries
Authors quoted
Index