Collins Good Grammar

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Graham King. Collins Good Grammar

Contents

The Thirteen Gremlims of Grammar

Introduction: How to wrestle with grammar – and win!

What is Grammar? Why use it?

You know more about grammar than you think

Answers to the Grammar Test

Let’s Look at Sentences

The long-winded sentence

When a sentence isn’t a sentence

The inner workings of the classic sentence

Simple, Compound and Complex Sentences

Types of Regular Sentences

The ‘Voice’ of a Sentence

The Mood of a Sentence

Ellipsis: Trimming away ‘Sentence Fat’

Harmony in the Sentence

Starting a Sentence with ‘And’ and ‘But’

The Building Blocks of Sentences: Parts of Speech

Nouns

Verbs

Adjectives

Adverbs

Pronouns

Determiners

Conjunctions

Prepositions

Interjections

Phrases and Clauses

Misplaced Clauses

Naming Things: Nouns

Common and Proper Nouns

Countable and Uncountable Nouns

Singular and Plural Nouns

Collective Nouns

How Nouns Become Possessive

You, Me and other Pronouns

PERSONAL PRONOUNS

Problems with Personal Pronouns

The Generic Personal Pronoun ‘One’

The Versatile Personal Pronoun ‘It’

POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS

REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS

DEMONSTRATIVE PRONOUNS

INTERROGATIVE PRONOUNS

Who or Whom: That is the Question!

RELATIVE PRONOUNS

INDEFINITE PRONOUNS

RECIPROCAL PRONOUNS

NUMBER PRONOUNS

Avoid Perplexing Pronouns

That and Which

That and Who

Drop ‘that’ With Care

The Search for the Uni-gender Third Person Pronoun

It’s a plane! It’s a bird! No! It’s SUPERVERB!

Regular and Irregular Verbs

Some Disorderly, Disobedient, Deviating Irregular Verbs

Auxiliary Verbs

The Twelve Tenses:

A Verbal Warning!

The Expressive Power of Auxiliary Verbs

Will and Shall

May and Might

Transitive and Intransitive Verbs

Phrasal Verbs

Verbals and Verb Phrases

Participles

The Dangling, or Misplaced Participle

Infinitives

To boldly go . . . The Split Infinitive

Gerunds

A Two Minute Verbal Workout

ANSWERS

Describing Things: Adjectives and Adverbs

Adjectives

Recognising Adjectives

Kinds of Adjective

The E-x-p-a-n-d-i-n-g Adjective

Tips on Using Adjectives

Add To Your Adjectives: 2 Minute Test

Adverbs

How Adverbs Work

Positioning Your Adverbs

Tips on Using Adverbs

Grammatical Glue: Determiners, Conjunctions and Prepositions

Determiners

Definite Determiners

Indefinite Determiners

Conjunctions

Prepositions

Sir Ernest’s Verbose Prepositions

Interjections!

Grammatical Gluemanship: a Two Minute Test

Answers

Punctuation: What’s the Point?

Punctuation: Devices for Separating and Joining

The Full Stop

The Comma

Functions of the Comma

The ‘comma splice’

Using Commas with Adjectives

The Oxford, or Final Comma

Other Problem Comma Placements

Using Commas to Parenthesise

The Semicolon

The Colon

Brackets and Parentheses

The Square Bracket

The Dash

The Hyphen

Wordbreaks and Linebreaks

Hassle-free Hyphenating

Punctuation: Symbols of Meaning

The Question Mark

The ‘Semi’-question

The Exclamation Mark

The Apostrophe

Possessive Apostrophes

Contraction Apostrophes

Quotation Marks

Quoting Direct Speech

How to Close Quotations

British and American Punctuation

The Three-dot Ellipsis

The Asterisk

Bullets

The Stroke

Italics, Bold and Underlining

Capitalisation

Writing Good English: The Elements of Style

Remember the Basics

Build on Brevity

The Quality of Life

Add Colour to your Word Palette

The Writer’s Seven Deadly Sins

Elegant Variation

Plagiarism

To sum up . .

Index

If you enjoyed Collins Good Grammar, check out these other great Graham King titles

About the Author

Writing Guides by Graham King

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

Cover

Title Page

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Did Ben just throw a ball through the window?

Look at that rose bush in the garden.

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