A friendly guide to proper English grammar. Features coverage of pronouns, participles, parallel structure of verbs, adjectives, and tenses, and proper punctuation. Also covers effective proofreading, using slang, avoiding common grammatical errors, and conveying the appropriate meaning.
Why does grammar make everyone so nervous? Probably because English teachers, for decades – no, for centuries – have been making a big deal out of grammar in classrooms, diagramming sentences and drilling the parts of speech, clauses, and verbals into students until they beg for mercy. Happily, you don't have to learn all those technical terms of English grammar – and you certainly don't have to diagram sentences – in order to speak and write correct English.
So rest assured – English Grammar For Dummies will probably never make your English teacher's top-ten list of must-read books, because you won't have to diagram a single sentence. What you will discover are fun and easy strategies that can help you when you're faced with such grammatical dilemmas as the choice between "I" and "me," "had gone" and "went," and "who" and "whom." With English Grammar For Dummies, you won't have to memorize a long list of meaningless rules (well, maybe a couple in the punctuation chapter!), because when you understand the reason for a particular word choice, you'll pick the correct word automatically.

This book fills a longstanding need for a basic introduction to Cognitive Grammar that is current, authoritative, comprehensive, and approachable. It presents a synthesis that draws together and refines the descriptive and theoretical notions developed in this framework over the course of three decades. In a unified manner, it accommodates both the conceptual and the social-interactive basis of linguistic structure, as well as the need for both functional explanation and explicit structural description.