How to Write
This is not a writing manual, nor a guide to grammar, nor to rhetoric. Obviously not: look at its length, or lack of it. It is only a small book aiming to help you form ideas about writing, and to write whenever you want to. Writing need not be an ordeal nor an impossible feat. It is a do-able task: one that becomes a pleasure when you get into it. Reading this book should make writing easier, and should keep you from breaking your head in attempts on the impossible. But I don’t guarantee masterpieces. In fact, I don’t mean to deal with creative writing. How could one ever generalize about the ways of creative writers? Their methods are individual to a fault: some pursue total spontaneity; some mull over poems for months and then
write them in a day

This abridged version of Radford's Minimalist Syntax: Exploring the Structure of English offers a concise, accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, it leads students through a range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. An extensive glossary is included and each chapter contains a workbook section with "helpful hints", exercises, and model answers, suitable for class discussion and self-study.