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Were you taught grammar in elementary school, middle school, or high school? (I wasn't.) If not, what have you done to remedy that? (Make sure you're getting our free email lessons.) Today, I want to share part of an email that I received from a reader named Joe.

I am a 54-year-old financial planner, and I have college degrees in accounting and history. I was taught almost no grammar in high school or college.

When my mother complained that we were not being taught grammar in our high school English classes, she was told that we should have already been taught grammar by then.

Several months ago, I asked my wife how to use "affect" and "effect." She told me "affect" was a verb, and "effect" was a noun.

That answer did not help me one bit.

Does Joe's story sound familiar to you?

If I were sitting next to you right now, could you tell me the difference between a verb and a noun?

Joe went on to say that he has become an avid grammar student and he is using sentence diagramming to help his understanding. He noticed a gap in his knowledge and took responsibility for it. He took action and began learning on his own. I find that inspiring!

If you can relate to Joe's story and you'd like to learn grammar, I'll show you five steps you can take right now to get a better understanding of grammar. If you're confused about grammar, what are you waiting for? It's your time to learn!

If you're insecure about grammar or writing, I urge you to spend some time learning. You're smart. You can do it!

Follow These Steps For Learning Grammar,
And You'll Become A Grammar Pro

Step 1. Learn the Parts of Speech

Step 2. Contemplate the Awesomeness of Sentences

It's great to understand all of the word categories, but the magic happens when we start to put words together. That's why the second step for learning grammar is to learn more about sentences!

Sentences are nice little packages of words that come together to express one complete thought. All complete sentences contain a subject (someone or something) and a verb (an action or a state of being). Basically, all sentences boil down to this:

Someone or something doing or being something

Now things are going to start getting fun! Phrases are units of language, and we use them all of the time. They are groups of words, but they come together to function as a single unit.

There are many different kinds of phrases.

Go to the phrases page and familiarize yourself with phrases. If you're a beginner, focus only on verb phrases and prepositional phrases for now.

Clauses are another unit of language, and learning grammar requires that you study them next! All clauses contain a subject and a verb. Some clauses can stand alone (independent clauses) and some cannot (dependent clauses).

Those that can't stand alone function as single parts of speech - just like phrases!

Go to the clauses page and study independent clauses and the three types of dependent clauses.

Step 5. Use Sentence Diagrams

Sentence diagramming is a great way to help you learn grammar and retain everything that you learn for years to come. Sprinkle your diagramming lessons throughout the first four steps.

Step 6. Optional Step (If It's Right For You)

You can learn grammar and sentence diagramming by going through the information on this website. Use the steps and links above, and you'll be on your way!

If you want a more interactive approach for learning grammar, check out our Get Smart Grammar Program. It goes through all of the topics listed above (and more) and gives you videos, exercises, and quizzes to test yourself along the way. The lessons are broken down into manageable chunks, and all you need to do is go through the lessons in order.

I have to tell you how much I love your product [Get Smart]. I have struggled with understanding grammar my whole life, and I felt like I was stupid because I could not memorize the rules.

I was seriously leaning towards walking away from my dream job as a college professor because of my embarrassment and fear of getting caught as being a fraud! Thank God for you! I have confidence, and I actually love grammar now. Thank you for everything!

- Carly, College Professor

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Follow These 5 Steps for Learning Grammar

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Were you taught grammar in elementary school, middle school, or high school? (I wasn't.) If not, what have you done to remedy that? (Make sure you're getting our free email lessons.) Today, I want to share part of an email that I received from a reader named Joe.

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Kahn Academy has some excellent videos about grammar.

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Introduction to Grammar | Grammar | Khan Academy

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John Green's channel is great! He has so many videos on many subjects - search just for the grammar ones.

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A channel where knowledge junkies come to get their fix of trivia-tastic information! Subscribe and check for new episodes uploaded every other Wednesday!

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These are oldies, but many kids learn best through music! Take a look (for our purposes, just at those that are grammar)!

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Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Is Texting Killing the English Language?"

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Is Texting Killing the English Language?"

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People have always spoken differently from how they write, and texting is actually talking with your fingers

Getty Images

Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all - it's actually more akin to spoken language. And it's a "spoken" language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.

First, some historical perspective. Writing was only invented 5,500 years ago, whereas language probably traces back at least 80,000 years. Thus talking came first; writing is just an artifice that came along later. As such, the first writing was based on the way people talk, with short sentences - think of the Old Testament. However, while talk is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting tapeworm sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."

( MORE: Why Americans Need Spelling Bees and Vocabulary Tests)

No one talks like that casually - or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions, and that's what oratory is, like the grand-old kinds of speeches that William Jennings Bryan delivered. In the old days, we didn't much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do - and a revolution has begun. It involves the brute mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting is actually a new kind of talking. There is a virtual cult of concision and little interest in capitalization or punctuation. The argument that texting is "poor writing" is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones is "bad music" because it doesn't use violas. Texting is developing its own kind of grammar and conventions.

( MORE: Banning the Term Illegal Immigrant Won't Change the Stigma)

Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn't actually mean "laughing out loud" in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts "Where have you been?" and Annabelle texts back "LOL at the library studying for two hours." LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something - conveying an attitude - just like the -ed ending conveys past tense rather than "meaning" anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.

Of course no one thinks about that consciously. But then most of communication operates below the radar. Over time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts - meat used to mean any kind of food, silly used to mean, believe it or not, blessed.

Civilization, then, is fine - people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting - quick, casual and only intended to be read once - is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

All indications are that America's youth are doing it quite well. Texting, far from being a scourge, is a work in progress.
This essay is adapted from McWhorter's talk at TED 2013.
MORE: Why Do We Love to Invent Languages?

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Is Texting Killing the English Language? | TIME.com

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Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all - it's actually more akin to spoken language.

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"Teaching Spelling and Grammar is Still Vital..."

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"Teaching Spelling and Grammar is Still Vital..."

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In a recent article for The Telegraph, Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, claimed that in today's technologically-advanced world that there was no place for teaching grammar or spelling as the technology would correct it for us.

However, this argument falls down in one fundamental area - it relies on students having a high standard of literacy already. The whole-school role of teaching literacy seems to stumble when computers are involved but the basics of literacy are just as important, even when the on switch has been flicked.

On one day in my training year, I realised that, despite living in the UK where there are 54.5 million personal computers in use, there are still a large proportion of students who arrive at secondary school without having grasped the basics of using a computer. One student couldn't log on to her computer because she couldn't find the 'CTRL', 'ALT' and 'Delete' buttons and, secondly, because she couldn't spell the password she had been told.

It seems to be commonly viewed that students are tech-savvy, and indeed a lot of them are. But, what about those who aren't? Much of the recent educational discourse has focused on 'narrowing the gaps' in attainment and ways to achieve this. Surely access to technology is part of this? This is just another reason why we cannot rely on technology to solve our literacy needs - not everyone has access to it.

Spelling when using computers does matter and we, as teachers, should not assume that this becomes less important just because our students have a computer at hand. We are all aware that Google helpfully pops us with 'Did you mean x?' when we make a simple typo. However, this isn't a failsafe tool; what about when you spell a word so inaccurately that Google cannot find it or it brings up a word you didn't want?

In one of my first years of teaching, I taught a year 8 student who had a spelling age of six years. She was producing an article about a market stall which sold wellies and was on Google looking for an image to finish her article when she piped up with: "Miss, I can't find a picture of any wellies for my article". Why couldn't she find a picture of any wellies? Because she had typed in 'willies' instead. Luckily for me, the school's internet protection software was preventing her computer from showing any images.

It is similar to handing a student a dictionary and telling them to find out how to spell a word. They must have at least some idea of roughly how to spell the word or the first few letters to be able to find it, and they need this level of knowledge to check or guess spelling using a computer. I have watched students type work on to a word processing document with a spell checker and the spelling is so inaccurate that it doesn't appear as a correction or they then select the wrong word from the list of corrections. Plus, it takes them twice as long to correct their work as if they had been taught spellings. Teaching students to rely on technology for spelling is not the way forward.

To assume that literacy is the domain of English teachers is wrong; just as it is wrong to assume that teaching computing is the domain of the ICT teacher. Any subject that uses a computer is also responsible for teaching literacy and this doesn't stop when we press the on-switch of a piece of technology.
Laura Deighton is a teacher of English at a school in South Yorkshire. She is a Teach First ambassador and tweets as @miss_edugogy.
This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. Looking for your next role? Take a look at Guardian jobs for schools for thousands of the latest teaching, leadership and support jobs.

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Teaching spelling and grammar is still vital in a technology-driven classroom

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In a recent article for The Telegraph, Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, claimed that in today's technologically-advanced world that there was no place for teaching grammar or spelling as the technology would correct it for us.

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"Before Turning Students into Writers, Teach them Grammar"

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"Before Turning Students into Writers, Teach them Grammar"

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Before Turning Students into Writers, Teach Them Grammar | National Association of Scholars

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I have taught English composition at both community colleges and universities. I have also taken more than my fair share of writing classes. And the emphasis, no matter what side of the desk I have been on, has always been on learning the writing process, on trying to turn people into writers.

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No more diagramming sentences: Students learn more from simply writing and reading.

A century of research shows that traditional grammar lessons-those hours spent diagramming sentences and memorizing parts of speech-don't help and may even hinder students' efforts to become better writers. Yes, they need to learn grammar, but the old-fashioned way does not work.

This finding-confirmed in 1984, 2007, and 2012 through reviews of over 250 studies-is consistent among students of all ages, from elementary school through college. For example, one well-regarded study followed three groups of students from 9th to 11th grade where one group had traditional rule-bound lessons, a second received an alternative approach to grammar instruction, and a third received no grammar lessons at all, just more literature and creative writing. The result: No significant differences among the three groups-except that both grammar groups emerged with a strong antipathy to English.

There is a real cost to ignoring such findings. In my work with adults who dropped out of school before earning a college degree, I have found over and over again that they over-edit themselves from the moment they sit down to write. They report thoughts like "Is this right? Is that right?" and "Oh my god, if I write a contraction, I'm going to flunk." Focused on being correct, they never give themselves a chance to explore their ideas or ways of expressing those ideas. Significantly, this sometimes-debilitating focus on "the rules" can be found in students who attended elite private institutions as well as those from resource-strapped public schools.
We need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write.
These students are victims of the mistaken belief that grammar lessons must come before writing, rather than grammar being something that is best learned through writing. I saw the high cost of this phenomenon first-hand at the urban community college where I taught writing for eight years, an institution where more than 90 percent of students failed to complete a two-year degree within three years. (The national average is only marginally better at roughly 80 percent.) A primary culprit: the required developmental writing classes that focused on traditional grammar instruction. Again and again, I witnessed aspiration gave way to discouragement. In this seven-college system, some 80 percent of the students test into such classes where they can spend up to a year before being asked to write more than a paragraph. Nationally, over half of university and college students in developmental classes drop out before going any further. Essentially, they leave before having begun college.

Happily, there are solutions. Just as we teach children how to ride bikes by putting them on a bicycle, we need to teach students how to write grammatically by letting them write. Once students get ideas they care about onto the page, they are ready for instruction-including grammar instruction-that will help communicate those ideas. We know that grammar instruction that works includes teaching students strategies for revising and editing, providing targeted lessons on problems that students immediately apply to their own writing, and having students play with sentences like Legos, combining basic sentences into more complex ones. Often, surprisingly little formal grammar instruction is needed. Researcher Marcia Hurlow has shown that many errors "disappear" from student writing when students focus on their ideas and stop "trying to 'sound correct.'"

There are also less immediately apparent costs to having generations of learners who associate writing only with correctness. Invariably, when people learn that I teach writing, they offer their "grammar confessions." Sheepishly, they tell me that they "never really learned grammar," and sadly, it also often comes out that they avoid writing. I have interviewed an executive who locked herself in her office and called her son when she had to write reports, and I have had parents describe writing their child's paper because the kid was paralyzed with writing anxiety. I have even had people tell me that they passed up job opportunities because they required writing.

Schools that have shifted from traditional "stand-alone" grammar to teaching grammar through writing offer concrete proof that such approaches work. They are moving more students more quickly into college-level courses than previously thought possible. One of these is a program at Arizona State in which students who test below college-level in their writing ability immediately begin writing college essays. More than 88 percent of these students pass freshman English-a pass rate that is higher than that for students who enter the university as college-level writers. At the Community College of Baltimore, a program in which developmental writing students get additional support while taking college-level writing classes has reduced the time these students spend in developmental courses while more than doubling the number who pass freshman composition. More than 60 colleges and universities are now experimenting with programs modeled on this approach.

In 1984, George Hillocks, a renowned professor of English and Education at the University of Chicago, published an analysis of the research on teaching writing. He concluded that, "School boards, administrators, and teachers who impose the systematic study of traditional school grammar on their students over lengthy periods of time in the name of teaching writing do them a gross disservice that should not be tolerated by anyone concerned with the effective teaching of good writing." If 30 years later, you or your child is still being taught grammar independent of actually writing, it is well past time to demand writing instruction that is grounded in research rather than nostalgia.

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No more diagramming sentences: Students learn more from simply writing and reading.

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Here are videos for all occasions!

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grammar english spelling school language

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These OWL resources will help you use correct grammar in your writing. This area includes resources on grammar topics, such as count and noncount nouns, articles (a versus an), subject-verb agreement, and prepositions. Grammar-related exercises can be found here.

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Starting sentences with conjunctions...is it okay?

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Starting sentences with conjunctions...is it okay?

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Teaching Grammar and its Related Content

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Teaching Grammar and its Related Content

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Read “Teaching Grammar”
and its related content: “Goals and Techniques for Teaching Grammar,” “Strategies for Learning
Grammar,” “Developing Grammar Activities,” “Using Textbook Grammar Activities,” and
“Assessing Grammar Proficiency.” All links can be found on main page under “Section
Contents.”

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The communicative competence model balances these extremes. The model recognizes that overt grammar instruction helps students acquire the language more efficiently, but it incorporates grammar teaching and learning into the larger context of teaching students to use the language. Instructors using this model teach students the grammar they need to know to accomplish defined communication tasks.

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English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn't spoken, there is no such thing as a 'spelling bee' competition. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.

Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking. Speaking came long before writing, we speak much more, and all but a couple of hundred of the world's thousands of languages are rarely or never written. Yet even in its spoken form, English is weird. It's weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels 'normal' only until you get a sense of what normal really is.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn't hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.

We think it's a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it's us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family - Indo-European - and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I'm writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk- s - why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.

Why is our language so eccentric? Just what is this thing we're speaking, and what happened to make it this way?

English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Old English is so unlike the modern version that it feels like a stretch to think of them as the same language at all. Hw æ t, we gardena in geardagum þ eodcyninga þ rym gefrunon - does that really mean 'So, we Spear-Danes have heard of the tribe-kings' glory in days of yore'? Icelanders can still read similar stories written in the Old Norse ancestor of their language 1,000 years ago, and yet, to the untrained eye, Beowulf might as well be in Turkish.

The first thing that got us from there to here was the fact that, when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (and also Frisians) brought their language to England, the island was already inhabited by people who spoke very different tongues. Their languages were Celtic ones, today represented by Welsh, Irish and Breton across the Channel in France. The Celts were subjugated but survived, and since there were only about 250,000 Germanic invaders - roughly the population of a modest burg such as Jersey City - very quickly most of the people speaking Old English were Celts.

Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first ( came first the verb). But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: they used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker - as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones. Notice how even to dwell upon this queer usage of do is to realise something odd in oneself, like being made aware that there is always a tongue in your mouth.

At this date there is no documented language on earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English's weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We're still talking like them, and in ways we'd never think of. When saying 'eeny, meeny, miny, moe', have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are - in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognisably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. 'Hickory, dickory, dock' - what in the world do those words mean? Well, here's a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine and ten in that same Celtic counting list.

pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we are today: the Scandies made English easier

The second thing that happened was that yet more Germanic-speakers came across the sea meaning business. This wave began in the ninth century, and this time the invaders were speaking another Germanic offshoot, Old Norse. But they didn't impose their language. Instead, they married local women and switched to English. However, they were adults and, as a rule, adults don't pick up new languages easily, especially not in oral societies. There was no such thing as school, and no media. Learning a new language meant listening hard and trying your best. We can only imagine what kind of German most of us would speak if this was how we had to learn it, never seeing it written down, and with a great deal more on our plates (butchering animals, people and so on) than just working on our accents.

As long as the invaders got their meaning across, that was fine. But you can do that with a highly approximate rendition of a language - the legibility of the Frisian sentence you just read proves as much. So the Scandinavians did pretty much what we would expect: they spoke bad Old English. Their kids heard as much of that as they did real Old English. Life went on, and pretty soon their bad Old English was real English, and here we are today: the Scandies made English easier.

I should make a qualification here. In linguistics circles it's risky to call one language 'easier' than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we'd never pretend there's no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm. Likewise, some languages plainly jangle with more bells and whistles than others. If someone were told he had a year to get as good at either Russian or Hebrew as possible, and would lose a fingernail for every mistake he made during a three-minute test of his competence, only the masochist would choose Russian - unless he already happened to speak a language related to it. In that sense, English is 'easier' than other Germanic languages, and it's because of those Vikings.

Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language - but the Scandies didn't bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English's weirdnesses. What's more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular - s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff.

They also followed the lead of the Celts, rendering the language in whatever way seemed most natural to them. It is amply documented that they left English with thousands of new words, including ones that seem very intimately 'us': sing the old song 'Get Happy' and the words in that title are from Norse. Sometimes they seemed to want to stake the language with 'We're here, too' signs, matching our native words with the equivalent ones from Norse, leaving doublets such as dike (them) and ditch (us), scatter (them) and shatter (us), and ship (us) vs skipper (Norse for ship was skip, and so skipper is 'shipper').

But the words were just the beginning. They also left their mark on English grammar. Blissfully, it is becoming rare to be taught that it is wrong to say Which town do you come from?, ending with the preposition instead of laboriously squeezing it before the wh-word to make From which town do you come? In English, sentences with 'dangling prepositions' are perfectly natural and clear and harm no one. Yet there is a wet-fish issue with them, too: normal languages don't dangle prepositions in this way. Spanish speakers: note that El hombre quien yo llegué con ('The man whom I came with') feels about as natural as wearing your pants inside out. Every now and then a language turns out to allow this: one indigenous one in Mexico, another one in Liberia. But that's it. Overall, it's an oddity. Yet, wouldn't you know, it's one that Old Norse also happened to permit (and which Danish retains).

as if all this wasn't enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages

We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a single sentence. Say That's the man you walk in with, and it's odd because 1) the has no specifically masculine form to match man, 2) there's no ending on walk, and 3) you don't say 'in with whom you walk'. All that strangeness is because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.

Finally, as if all this wasn't enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans - descended from the same Vikings, as it happens - conquered England, ruled for several centuries and, before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones developed a sense of English as a vehicle of sophisticated writing, and so it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.

It was thanks to this influx from French and Latin (it's often hard to tell which was the original source of a given word) that English acquired the likes of crucified, fundamental, definition and conclusion. These words feel sufficiently English to us today, but when they were new, many persons of letters in the 1500s (and beyond) considered them irritatingly pretentious and intrusive, as indeed they would have found the phrase 'irritatingly pretentious and intrusive'. (Think of how French pedants today turn up their noses at the flood of English words into their language.) There were even writerly sorts who proposed native English replacements for those lofty Latinates, and it's hard not to yearn for some of these: in place of crucified, fundamental, definition and conclusion, how about crossed, groundwrought, saywhat, and endsay?

But language tends not to do what we want it to. The die was cast: English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things. One result was triplets allowing us to express ideas with varying degrees of formality. Help is English, aid is French, assist is Latin. Or, kingly is English, royal is French, regal is Latin - note how one imagines posture improving with each level: kingly sounds almost mocking, regal is straight-backed like a throne, royal is somewhere in the middle, a worthy but fallible monarch.

Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs begin and commence, or want and desire. Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: we kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking labourers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one's place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today.

Caveat lector, though: traditional accounts of English tend to oversell what these imported levels of formality in our vocabulary really mean. It is sometimes said that they alone make the vocabulary of English uniquely rich, which is what Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil claim in the classic The Story of English (1986): that the first load of Latin words actually lent Old English speakers the ability to express abstract thought. But no one has ever quantified richness or abstractness in that sense (who are the people of any level of development who evidence no abstract thought, or even no ability to express it?), and there is no documented language that has only one word for each concept. Languages, like human cognition, are too nuanced, even messy, to be so elementary. Even unwritten languages have formal registers. What's more, one way to connote formality is with substitute expressions: English has life as an ordinary word and existence as the fancy one, but in the Native American language Zuni, the fancy way to say life is 'a breathing into'.

Even in English, native roots do more than we always recognise. We will only ever know so much about the richness of even Old English's vocabulary because the amount of writing that has survived is very limited. It's easy to say that comprehend in French gave us a new formal way to say understand - but then, in Old English itself, there were words that, when rendered in Modern English, would look something like 'forstand', 'underget', and 'undergrasp'. They all appear to mean 'understand', but surely they had different connotations, and it is likely that those distinctions involved different degrees of formality.

Nevertheless, the Latinate invasion did leave genuine peculiarities in our language. For instance, it was here that the idea that 'big words' are more sophisticated got started. In most languages of the world, there is less of a sense that longer words are 'higher' or more specific. In Swahili, Tumtazame mbwa atakavyofanya simply means 'Let's see what the dog will do.' If formal concepts required even longer words, then speaking Swahili would require superhuman feats of breath control. The English notion that big words are fancier is due to the fact that French and especially Latin words tend to be longer than Old English ones - end versus conclusion, walk versus ambulate.

The multiple influxes of foreign vocabulary also partly explain the striking fact that English words can trace to so many different sources - often several within the same sentence. The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier version of that same word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little interest for, say, Arabic speakers.

this muttly vocabulary is a big part of why there's no language so close to English that learning it is easy

To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English's hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin. Greek is another element: in an alternate universe, we would call photographs 'lightwriting'. According to a fashion that reached its zenith in the 19th century, scientific things had to be given Greek names. Hence our undecipherable words for chemicals: why can't we call monosodium glutamate 'one-salt gluten acid'? It's too late to ask. But this muttly vocabulary is one of the things that puts such a distance between English and its nearest linguistic neighbours.

And finally, because of this firehose spray, we English speakers also have to contend with two different ways of accenting words. Clip on a suffix to the word wonder, and you get wonderful. But - clip on an ending to the word modern and the ending pulls the accent ahead with it: MO-dern, but mo-DERN-ity, not MO-dern-ity. That doesn't happen with WON-der and WON-der-ful, or CHEER-y and CHEER-i-ly. But it does happen with PER-sonal, person-AL-ity.

What's the difference? It's that - ful and - ly are Germanic endings, while - ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer - TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous - while Germanic ones leave the accent alone. One never notices such a thing, but it's one way this 'simple' language is actually not so.

Thus the story of English, from when it hit British shores 1,600 years ago to today, is that of a language becoming delightfully odd. Much more has happened to it in that time than to any of its relatives, or to most languages on Earth. Here is Old Norse from the 900s CE, the first lines of a tale in the Poetic Edda called The Lay of Thrym. The lines mean 'Angry was Ving-Thor/he woke up,' as in: he was mad when he woke up. In Old Norse it was:

The same two lines in Old Norse as spoken in modern Icelandic today are:

Reiður var þá Vingþórr / er hann vaknaði.

You don't need to know Icelandic to see that the language hasn't changed much. 'Angry' was once vreiðr; today's reiður is the same word with the initial v worn off and a slightly different way of spelling the end. In Old Norse you said vas for was; today you say var - small potatoes.

In Old English, however, 'Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up' would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/ he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as 'English', but we're clearly a lot further from Beowulf than today's Reykjavikers are from Ving-Thor.

Thus English is indeed an odd language, and its spelling is only the beginning of it. In the widely read Globish (2010), McCrum celebrates English as uniquely 'vigorous', 'too sturdy to be obliterated' by the Norman Conquest. He also treats English as laudably 'flexible' and 'adaptable', impressed by its mongrel vocabulary. McCrum is merely following in a long tradition of sunny, muscular boasts, which resemble the Russians' idea that their language is 'great and mighty', as the 19th-century novelist Ivan Turgenev called it, or the French idea that their language is uniquely 'clear' ( Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas fran ç ais).

However, we might be reluctant to identify just which languages are not 'mighty', especially since obscure languages spoken by small numbers of people are typically majestically complex. The common idea that English dominates the world because it is 'flexible' implies that there have been languages that failed to catch on beyond their tribe because they were mysteriously rigid. I am not aware of any such languages.

What English does have on other tongues is that it is deeply peculiar in the structural sense. And it became peculiar because of the slings and arrows - as well as caprices - of outrageous history.

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Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? - John McWhorter | Aeon Essays

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English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn't spoken, there is no such thing as a 'spelling bee' competition.

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Why is grammar important?

Grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to talk about language. Grammar names the types of words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any language. As human beings, we can put sentences together even as children - we can all do grammar. But to be able to talk about how sentences are built, about the types of words and word groups that make up sentences - that is knowing about grammar. And knowing about grammar offers a window into the human mind and into our amazingly complex mental capacity.

People associate grammar with errors and correctness. But knowing about grammar also helps us understand what makes sentences and paragraphs clear and interesting and precise. Grammar can be part of literature discussions, when we and our students closely read the sentences in poetry and stories. And knowing about grammar means finding out that all languages and all dialects follow grammatical patterns.

Is grammar included in the NCTE/IRA Standards for the English Language Arts?

Four of the twelve standards call on the students' understanding of language and sentence structure:

Standard #3 refers to the range of strategies and abilities students should use to comprehend and appreciate texts, and among these is their understanding of sentence structure.

Standard #4 explains that students should adjust their spoken and written language for different audiences and purposes, and these adjustments include changes in the conventions and style of language.

Standard #6 states that students should "apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation)" to create and critique both print and nonprint texts. (Italics added.)

Standard #9 calls for students to "develop an understanding of and respect for diversity in language use, patterns, and dialects across cultures, ethnic groups, geographic regions, and social roles." (Italics added.) Understanding basic grammar can help students see the patterns of different languages and dialects.

I hear that teaching grammar doesn't help students make fewer errors. But students make so many mistakes in their writing. What should I do?

Teaching grammar will not make writing errors go away. Students make errors in the process of learning, and as they learn about writing, they often make new errors, not necessarily fewer ones. But knowing basic grammatical terminology does provide students with a tool for thinking about and discussing sentences. And lots of discussion of language, along with lots of reading and lots of writing, are the three ingredients for helping students write in accordance with the conventions of standard English*.

I try to teach the standard parts of speech and the usual rules for correct writing even though I'm not convinced the students retain the information for very long. What's the best way to approach grammar under these circumstances?

Two suggestions:

The first is to be selective, to the extent that you can. Students benefit much more from learning a few grammar keys thoroughly than from trying to remember many terms and rules. Experiment with different approaches until you find the ones that work the best for you and your students. Some teachers focus on showing students how phrases add rich detail to sentences. Other teachers find that sentence diagrams help students see the organization of sentences. Some use grammar metaphors (the sentence, for example, as a bicycle, with the subject as the front wheel and the predicate as the back). Some emphasize the verb as the key part of speech, showing students how the sentence is built around it and how vivid verbs create vivid sentences.

The second suggestion is that whatever approach you take to grammar, show students how to apply it not only to their writing but also to their reading and to their other language arts activities. For example, knowing basic grammar can help students when they come across a difficult story or poem. If they know how to find the main verb and the subject, they have a better chance of figuring out a difficult sentence. When they like the way a writer writes, they can identify the sentence structures that the writer uses, and they can experiment with them themselves.

Make good use of the other languages and the various dialects of English in your classroom. Compare the informal private language that students speak around friends and family with public standard English*. Learn a little about the noun and verb patterns in Spanish and African American Vernacular English, for example, so that you can make comparisons when discussing standard English*. Students feel prouder of their home language when they hear even briefly in school about its grammatical patterns.

Grammar workbook exercises get pretty dull, but they do cover the basics. Are they worthwhile? How should I use them?

Traditional drill and practice will be the most meaningful to students when they are anchored in the context of writing assignments or the study of literary models. Students find grammar most interesting when they apply it to authentic texts. Try using texts of different kinds, such as newspapers and the students' own writing, as sources for grammar examples and exercises. This approach helps make grammar relevant and alive. It also avoids the artificiality of studying sentences in isolation, a problem with grammar books; in real texts, students can see how sentences connect and contrast to each other through their grammar.

What kinds of grammar exercises help students write not just correct sentences but better, more expressive ones?

Inexperienced writers find it difficult to make changes in the sentences that they have written. Expanding sentences, rearranging the parts of a sentence, combining sentences - these skills do not come easily. So any exercises that help students acquire sentence flexibility have value. Two methods have yielded good results. One is sentence combining: students start with simple exercises in inserting phrases and combining sentences and progress towards exercises in embedding one clause in another. Another approach is for students to imitate model sentences; when students read a model passage and then write their version of it, imitating its grammatical features, they integrate reading skill, writing practice, and grammatical understanding.

Another type of grammar exercise is for students to practice using certain subordinate constructions that enrich sentences. Participles, -ing and -ed verb forms, can be used by themselves or as phrases, adding detail with a sense of action, drawing the reader into the sentence (as with the two participial phrases that close this sentence). Its purpose being to focus readers' attention, an absolute phrase, like the one that begins this sentence, operates like a zoom lens. An appositive, a noun or noun phrase that renames another noun, adds information quickly (as this sentence illustrates).

Grammar is a large, complicated subject, and I'm not very sure about some of it myself. Besides the grammar material that is in the books I teach, what topics in grammar will help my students?

Here are some recent additions to the traditional study of grammar that you can use in the classroom:

All native speakers of a language have more grammar in their heads than any grammar book will ever contain. Part of our goal as teachers is to help students discover that knowledge. ESL students can also benefit from the following suggestions, depending on their experience with English. Pass these methods on to your students, who will make good use of them.

1. The traditional definitions of the parts of speech can be difficult to apply. Students recognize the basic parts of speech more reliably and quickly by looking at the form of a word and by using sentence "frames." If a word can be made plural or possessive, or if it fits in the sentence "The _______ went there," it is a noun. If a word can be made past, or can take an -ing ending, it is a verb. Of course the same word form can often serve as more than one part of speech, but you can help students learn to recognize how a particular form is being used in a particular sentence by introducing them to a variety of tests.

2. Is a group of words a whole sentence or a fragment? If it doesn't make sense after an opening such as "I am convinced that," it is a fragment.Whatever you could do to help my sister.
I am convinced that whatever you could do to help my sister.
This is what you could do to help my sister.
I am convinced that this is what you could do to help my sister.

3. To help students find the verb phrase in a sentence, have them make the sentence negative by inserting did not, don't, or a similar term. The verb phrase is usually next to the word not.Simon tried to put the bike in the garage.
Simondid not try to put the bike in the garage.

4. To help students find the subject of a sentence, have them add a tag question such as isn't it? or aren't they? The pronoun that ends the appropriate tag question will usually refer to the sentence subject.Listening to loud music will damage your ears.
Listening to loud music will damage your ears, won't it?

5. Substitute a pronoun for the complete subject. This change shows students where the division between subject and predicate lies; it is also a simple way to check on subject-verb agreement.The girl with the saxophone is walking home.
She / is walking home.

A paragraph may be confusing or clear, vivid or vague, easy or difficult to read. No matter which it is, the quality of the paragraph depends in part on the grammatical features of the individual sentences. Show your students a few points that will help them both write better paragraphs and better understand the paragraphs in literature. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams is an outstanding resource on these approaches.

1. The grammatical subjects of all the sentences in a paragraph, taken together, tell the reader what the paragraph is about. If the subjects of the sentences are too diverse, the paragraph will usually be difficult to follow. Sentence subjects that are related to each other help make the paragraph coherent. Students can circle the sentence subjects in a published paragraph, observe this pattern at work, and then apply it to their own writing.

2. Another pattern is extremely important in the way groups of sentences flow together to make sense. Most sentences start with information that is already familiar to the reader, such as a pronoun or a subject noun that was mentioned earlier. Sentences then move toward new information that makes the point of the sentence and adds the details. This movement from the familiar to the new in each sentence makes text both interesting and coherent. Students can observe this pattern in literature and apply it to their own writing. They can also see it at work in casual conversation, in asking questions, and in speaking (and writing) in sentence fragments - all situations when the familiar information becomes detached from the new information.

3. The tendency for the vital information to fall toward the end of most sentences is known as end focus. Because so many sentences use end focus, placing the important words early catches the reader's attention. Key phrases can be moved forward. Cleft structures ("It was Juan who helped me") also move emphasized words forward.

Sources and Suggestions for Further Reading

Adger, Carolyn Temple, Catherine E. Snow, and Donna Christian (eds). What Teachers Need to Know about Language. Washington, DC; Center for Applied Linguistics, 2002.

DeBeaugrande, Robert. "Forward to the Basics: Getting Down to Grammar." College Composition and Communication. 35 (1984): 358-367.

"An Issue on Teaching Grammar." English Journal. 85.7 (1996).

Kolln, Martha. Rhetorical Grammar: Grammatical Choices, Rhetorical Effects. 3rd ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1998.

Kolln, Martha, and Robert Funk. Understanding English Grammar. 6th ed. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2002.

Noden, Harry R. Image Grammar: Using Grammatical Structures to Teach Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.

Noguchi, Rei. Grammar and the Teaching of Writing: Limits and Possibilities. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991.

Nystrand, Martin. "English Language Instruction." Encyclopedia of Education Research. Ed. M. C. Alkin. New York, NY: MacMillan, 1992: 443-453.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Weaver, Constance. Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1996.

_____, editor. Lessons to Share on Teaching Grammar in Context. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998.

Wheeler, Rebecca, ed. Language Alive in the Classroom. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Wheeler, Rebecca, ed. The Workings of Language. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. 6th ed. New York, NY: Longman, 2000.

Wolfram, Walt, Carolyn Temple Adger, and Donna Christian. Dialects in Schools and Communities. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999.

http://www.ateg.org. The Web site for the Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar, with a variety of resources for teaching and learning about grammar.

* Many people find the term standard English to be inaccurate and misleading because it creates a false impression that there exists a single variety of English that all educated Americans speak and write. Two alternative labels are edited written English and the Language of Wider Communication. See "Students' Right to Their Own Language," a CCCC position statement, at http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Groups/CCCC/NewSRTOL.pdf. For a fuller discussion of African American Vernacular English, see the Linguistic Society of America's position statement on Ebonics at http://www.lsadc.org.

Prepared by Brock Haussamen with Paul Doniger, Pam Dykstra, Martha Kolln, Kathryn Rogers, and Rebecca Wheeler, and with appreciation for the works and discussions of all the members of NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar.

This document has been endorsed by the Linguistic Society of America.
This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

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Some Questions and Answers about Grammar - NCTE

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Grammar is important because it is the language that makes it possible for us to talk about language. Grammar names the types of words and word groups that make up sentences not only in English but in any language. As human beings, we can put sentences together even as children - we can all do grammar.

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Click on "Diagnostic" and take both. Screenshot your scores & common errors (to refer to later, as you write). This is not the be-all, end-all, but it's a start.

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ExerciseZone. Use your diagnostic results to point you to practice in particular areas-or simply go to ExerciseZone and pick an area yourself. ExerciseZone includes thousands of practice items organized into 10-question practice sets on over 50 topics. Pick from Sentence Grammar, Basic Grammar, Punctuation and Mechanics, or Usage and Style topics, or choose to do sentence or paragraph editing exercises.