A lot of people have had some negative experiences working with grammar in the past and often find it to be both frustrating and pointless. If that’s the case with you, try to let those feelings go, and give it another chance. When you get right down to it, learning about grammar can be one of the most interesting studies you can undertake. One of the most fascinating things about grammar is how much of it you already know, but just don’t realize your brain does these things. How else do you explain that your brain knows that the sentence, “to store the go i” can’t exist in English. I’m willing to bet that most of you never had someone sit you down and teach you the order that words go in for English sentences, but that you know you should say, “I go to the store”. In many ways, your study of grammar is not learning new stuff, but taking things that you already do know and giving you the names to identify them.
Each lesson has activities on the left hand side that you should complete when you are ready to test your understanding of the concepts. It’s probably a good idea to print the page out so that you can work on it. Some activities have another page with explanations on it so you can check your work and see how well you understand the concepts.
This website gives you several lessons to work on, and you should make sure that you understand each one well before going on to the next. Don’t panic if it takes you a long time to master each lesson. If you spend weeks on one and understand it well, then you are learning very important things that will help your writing. The truth is that you will get frustrated at some point, but that’s not a reason to give up trying to learn a concept.
As to grammar being pointless, learning more about grammar will help you punctuate correctly, create greater variety in your sentences, and make your writing more mature which hopefully, you identify as all components of becoming a stronger writer.
©kmcelliott 2008