Good Grammar for Students

Howard Jackson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781412902038, 9781412902021
• eBook ISBN: 9781446228944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Forschung im Bildungswesen

Many students set out in further and higher education with little grounding in the skills required for academic writing. This practical guide will give students a command of grammar, spelling and punctuation, enabling them to improve the quality and accuracy of their writing. Good Grammar for Students includes:  

• the basics of English grammar - how sentences are structured
• help with spelling and punctuation
• tips on avoiding the most common mistakes and pitfalls
• advice on how students can improve their writing in essays, reports and projects.

The book is packed with examples to illustrate points and highlight good and bad practice, and contains handy tips and student exercises.

An indispensable companion for undergraduate students on any Social Science, Humanities or Arts degree course, Good Grammar for Students is also an ideal text for Study Skills modules at first year undergraduate level across the social sciences.

SAGE Study Skills are essential study guides for students of all levels. From how to write great essays and succeeding at university, to writing your undergraduate dissertation and doing postgraduate research, SAGE Study Skills help you get the best from your time at university. Visit the SAGE Study Skills hub for tips, resources and videos on study success!

 

1	What Do We Mean by ‘Grammar’ — Good and Bad?

If you have picked up this book and started reading it, then either you have been recommended to do so by a tutor, or you feel the need to improve your own writing by finding out more about how sentences and texts are structured. You already have the grammar of English stored in your head: you either acquired it as your first language, or learned it as a second or foreign language. And it serves you very well when you speak. Writing, though, is often a different matter: it demands more careful thought to get it structured right; and you have only one chance to get your meaning across, because your reader can’t usually ask you for clarification. So, for written language it helps to be aware of how the grammar works, so that you can make the right choices of words and structures to make your communication as effective as possible.

This first chapter is a ground-clearing exercise. Its aim is to clear out of the way some of the misconceptions that people frequently have about grammar and to propose a more reasonable view of grammar, so that we have an established starting point for the rest of the book.

EXERCISE

At this point, you may find it useful to write down what you think ‘grammar’ is about. Try and write it as a definition: ‘Grammar is ….’ Then compare your definition with the discussion that follows.

Say the word ‘grammar’ to most people and you will more than likely get a negative reaction. Why does the word have such a bad press? For older generations it may stem from hours toiling over tedious grammatical analysis in English lessons at school. For younger generations it is perhaps fear of the unknown and an apprehension that it is something that must be avoided.

While the primary purpose of this book is not to rehabilitate grammar, I hope that you will come to appreciate that a knowledge of the grammar of the language that you speak and write will not only benefit your career as a student, and beyond, but also prove to be not as scary as you had anticipated. Indeed, there are some of us who find the study of language, and of grammar in particular, to be so fascinating that we devote our working lives to it. ‘Sad people,’ you may say, but the results of their study may yet benefit you and your career.

If you are afraid of grammar, it is probably because you don’t know what grammar is about. Many people think of grammar as being primarily about spelling and punctuation, but these relate only to the written form of the language. They have no equivalent in the spoken language, and yet grammar is an essential component of both spoken and written language. Language would not be language without grammar.

Some Misconceptions Examined

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1. Grammar is the set of rules for speaking and writing English properly; for example, you should say we were and not we was.
2. Some languages have more grammar than others; English doesn’t have much grammar.
3. Foreigners need to learn grammar when they learn English, but I’m a native speaker and so I don’t need to.
4. Grammar is what you find in grammar books. I’ve never read one. Grammar is for nerds.
5. Grammar is no practical use to anyone except grammarians.

By labelling such statements as ‘misconceptions’, I have already betrayed that I think they are wrong; so let me explain why I think that.

The first of them is widespread, including among government ministers during the debates in the 1980s and 1990s on English in the national curriculum in schools. This view wants to reduce grammar teaching to a set of simple rules for correcting non-standard or dialect speech. The most often quoted rule was the so-called ‘subject–verb’ agreement rule, which states that you should say I was and he/she/it was, but we were, you were and they were. I and he/she/it are ‘singular’ subjects and so should be followed by the singular verb form was, while we, you and they are ‘plural’ subjects and should be followed by the plural verb form were. However, many people say – and it is a question largely of speech, not writing – we was and you was. One government minister went so far as to suggest that teachers on playground duty should listen out for such ‘mistakes’ and correct pupils who committed them.

Now, subject–verb agreement is something that grammar is concerned with, but not in this prescriptive way. Grammarians would recognise that different systems, or ‘rules’, operate in different contexts. People whose local speech form (dialect) has only the form was, whether the subject is singular or plural, do not necessarily carry across this ‘rule’ to formal writing. In saying this, you might notice that I’m trying to change the meaning of the term ‘rule’. For grammarians, a rule is not a prescription of language that must be obeyed; rather it is a convention by which we structure the sentences and utterances of our language. Grammatical rules vary from one variety of language or context of language use to another: speech is different in grammar from writing; teenage speech is different from adult speech; speech at the social club is different from speech at an academic conference. And sometimes a rule is variable anyway.

EXERCISE

Insert was or were in the following sentences:

1. Aston Villa _____ a great football team.
2. The band _____ exhausted by the end of the gig.
3. England _____ facing defeat yet again.
4. The government _____ proposing to charge students higher fees.

Normally you don’t think whether to use was or were; it’s instinctive. But in these examples both are possible; so, does it make any difference which you use? Arguably, using singular was means that you are regarding Aston Villa, the band, England and the government as single, undifferentiated entities; whereas using plural were implies that you regard them as groups of individuals.

Grammatical rules also change over time, even for a given variety of English. Let me give you two examples. You may have noticed that I used the preposition from after the adjective different at the end of the paragraph before the exercise. That probably marks me as being rather old-fashioned. Most people these days would say – and write – different to. One is not ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’; both ‘rules’ co-exist at the moment. In due course, different from may well disappear. My second example concerns the use of less and fewer.

EXERCISE

Insert either less or fewer in the following sentence:

There are _____ students in class this week.

My prediction would be that you would choose less rather than fewer. And I am sure that you would say: ‘There is less agreement about how we should dress for a formal occasion.’ The ‘rule’ used to be: use fewer with ‘countable’ nouns (like student) and less with ‘uncountable’ nouns (like agreement in this context). But the common practice in all varieties of English now seems to be: use less whatever noun may follow.

EXERCISE

Now insert either a large number of or a large amount of in the following sentence:

There was __________ students attending the class this week.

Your response to this one is rather less predictable. A similar and parallel change (to that affecting fewer/less) appears to be happening with a number of (used with countable nouns) and an amount of (used with uncountable nouns), especially if used in the expression a large number/amount of. If you chose number here but less in the previous example, then your grammar hasn’t quite completed the rule change that is taking place in contemporary English.

You may have noticed in our discussion of this first misconception that we have used grammatical terms like ‘subject’, ‘verb’, ‘noun’, ‘countable’, ‘agreement’. You cannot talk about how language works or how language is used without a grammatical terminology. This is the beginning of an answer to misconception 5.

Let us turn to the second misconception: that languages have variable amounts of grammar. This misconception usually arises among people who have had some experience of a highly inflecting language like Latin, Greek or Russian, or even of a moderately inflecting language like German or French. Grammar is here being equated with endings on words, the ‘declensions’ of nouns and adjectives and the ‘conjugations’ of verbs. In Latin, for example, every noun has potentially ten different forms, and every verb over a hundred, and the forms may differ according to the ‘class’ that a noun or verb belongs to. If that is all there is to grammar, then English doesn’t have very much:

• a maximum of three endings on a noun — girl-s (plural), girl-’s (possessive singular), girl-s’ (possessive plural)
• normally three endings on a verb — talk-s (third person singular present tense), talk-ed (past tense/past participle), talk-ing (present participle)
• two endings on some adjectives — small-er (comparative), small-est (superlative).

But that isn’t all there is to grammar. The kinds of grammatical meaning that are expressed by the endings (inflections) on Latin nouns and verbs are expressed in different ways in a language like English. What becomes more important is the order in which words are sequenced in a sentence and how different groups of words are joined together by items such as prepositions.

Let us turn to the third misconception: that grammar is only for foreign language learners. If English is your first language, or indeed if it is a second language acquired in childhood, then you will not have been taught grammar. Linguists talk of ‘language acquisition’, and the rules (including the grammar) for speaking English will have been ‘internalised’ with little conscious effort on your part. If you learn another language as a teenager or adult, then it is not so easy to ‘acquire’ this second language in the same way that you did your first language. You may well require, and it is often helpful to be told, something about the ‘rules’ of grammar in the language.

When you started school, if you can remember back that far, you would have been taught to read and write in your first language, and you would have been conscious of the learning effort involved. You would have learned new words, how to spell them, how to pronounce them, how to use them in sentences and texts. You would have learned in due course about the more complex sentence structures, about paragraphs and the structure of different types of text. The learning may have been more by example and correction of misguided efforts than by rule, but it involved learning rather than acquisition. Indeed, your task may have been made easier, if you could have understood how the system worked, and some of your present uncertainty and persistent mist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 What Do We Mean by ‘Grammar’ — Good and Bad?
• 2 Some Basic Terminology
• 3 Matching the Bits
• 4 Clauses — Main and Subordinate
• 5 Sentence Arrangements
• 6 Sentences into Texts
• 7 Getting Your Point Across
• 8 Why Can’t I Rely on My Computer’s Grammar Checker?
• 9 Spelling and Punctuation
• 10 Where To Go for Further Information
• Glossary
• Index