English Grammar For Dummies, UK Edition

Lesley Ward is a teacher of grammar, proofreading and copy-editing. She leads training courses at the Society of Editors and Proofreaders, the Publishing Training Centre, the Irish Book Publishers' Association and the London College of Communication. Geraldine Woods has taught grammar for more than 35 years and is the author of over 50 books.

• Introduction 1Part I: The Parts of Speech and Parts of the Sentence 7Chapter 1: I Already Know How to Talk Why Should I Study Grammar? 9Chapter 2: Verbs: The Heart of the Sentence 17Chapter 3: Relax! Understanding Verb Tense 33Chapter 4: Who’s Doing What? Finding the Subject 51Chapter 5: Having It All: The Complete Sentence 63Chapter 6: Handling Complements 73Part II: Avoiding Common Errors 83Chapter 7: Getting Hitched: Marrying Sentences 85Chapter 8: Do You Feel Bad or Badly? The Lowdown on Adjectives and Adverbs 99Chapter 9: Prepositions, Interjections and Articles 115Chapter 10: Everyone Brought Their Homework: Pronouns 125Chapter 11: Just Nod Your Head: About Agreement 137Part III: No Garage, but Plenty of Mechanics 153Chapter 12: Apostrophes 155Chapter 13: Quotations: More Rules than Revenue & Customs 171Chapter 14: The Pause That Refreshes: Commas 193Chapter 15: Adding Information: Semicolons, Dashes and Colons 203Chapter 16: Capital Letters 215Part IV: Polishing without Wax – The Finer Points of Grammar 229Chapter 17: Pronouns and Their Cases 231Chapter 18: Fine-Tuning Verbs 243Chapter 19: Saying What You Want to Say: Descriptive Words and Phrases 259Chapter 20: Good, Better, Best: Comparisons 265Chapter 21: Keeping Your Balance 279Part V: Rules Even Your Great-Aunt’s Grammar Teacher Didn’t Know 289Chapter 22: The Last Word on Verbs 291Chapter 23: The Last Word on Pronouns 301Chapter 24: The Last Word on Sentence Structure 313Chapter 25: The Last Word on Punctuation 327Part VI: The Part of Tens 341Chapter 26: Ten Ways Two to Improve Your Proofreading 343Chapter 27: Ten Ways to Learn Better Grammar 347Index 351