wheel, clutch, gears, brake, petrol tank, windscreen wipers and so forth. It’s also necessary to know just what each part does, and what happens when you press it, turn it, pull it or push it. You also need to learn some rules – about speed, signalling, red and green lights, traffic and road signs. When you do all this, you can drive. When you do it all well, you might even drive well. Of course many people learn to drive a car without professional instruction, but, insufficiently equipped, they are often a danger to themselves and others.
It’s not too different with reading, speaking and writing. Yes, we get by. But learning or relearning the rules and principles that govern the use of the language can only improve our communication skills. And more than ever, effective communicating is vital to our lives, our success, our enjoyment.
By picking up this book you’ve recognised that to improve your communication skills you probably need to return to basics. You’ve picked up the right book. Collins Good Grammar is designed to explain, step by practical step, authoritatively but entertainingly, the workings of our language, and to help you wrestle with its grammar – and win!
This won‘t take long.
A language requires two elements to fulfil man’s need to communicate effectively: a vocabulary and a grammar.
The vocabulary is the language’s stock of words: combinations of symbols, signs or letters that have evolved to identify things and ideas. But words by themselves can never constitute a language. Imagine someone possessing all the words required to express the message in the first three sentences, but no method of putting them together to make sense. An attempt might look like this:
Grammar about what duration of the clock will not take much duration not take small duration reasons to tell.
It would be like trying to build a solid wall with tennis balls. What’s needed is some cement or glue to stick them together, to create a structure that others will recognise. In the case of a language this glue is a system of rules called grammar.
Languages aren’t created in a day; some have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, and are still evolving. The users of any language must constantly invent to adapt to fresh circumstances, and when invention flags they must borrow.
Not only words, but rules, too. English grammar contains rules that can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans: rules that helped the early users of our language to string their words together to create increasingly clearer and more complex messages. They enabled that meaningless jumble of words to take shape as a recognisable sentence:
To tell what grammar is and that grammar should be used will need not little time not long time but some little long time.
A big improvement, but still clumsy and vague. Obviously the language still required some more words and rules. The speaker needed a word more precise than tell, such as explain. Also needed was a system for building phrases with their own meanings, and another system for adding inflections to basic words to indicate time and sequence: explain, explaining, explained. With such improvements the sentence not only becomes shorter but also expresses the speaker’s intentions with greater accuracy:
Explaining what grammar is and why you should use grammar will not take a long time.
Then users began to get clever by inventing idioms such as not too long to say in three words what it took nearly a dozen to say in an earlier version. They also learned about ellipsis. To avoid repetition they created pronouns to substitute for nouns, phrases and whole sentences. Here, this stands for the two questions:
What is Grammar? Why use it? This will not take long.
And then, finally, in the quest for even greater economy, the newly-invented apostrophe was brought into play, saving yet one more word:
What is Grammar? Why use it? This won’t take long.
And, having recognised that the promise following the original question is now history – in the past – our grasp of grammar’s immense potential allows us to write:
It hasn’t taken long, has it?
None of this should really surprise you, because if you are a native user of English you are also an intuitive user of its grammar. Although you may have either never known or have forgotten the difference between a common noun and a proper noun; are a little uncertain about using semi-colons and possessive apostrophes; are sublimely unconscious of piling on clichés and couldn’t recognise a split infinitive even if you were offered a fortune, you have always managed to be understood, to get your point across, to enjoy reading newspapers and magazines, to write letters and cards to your family and friends, to deal adequately with the demands of the workplace.
But ask yourself: am I cringing along in the slow lane, grammatically speaking, aware of the ever-increasing traffic in the faster lanes?
More than at any time in history, you are judged on your communication skills, whether in speech or in writing. The successful development of your personal life, your relationships and your career is now more and more dependent upon the way in which you express your thoughts, your insights, knowledge and desires into language. How well you accomplish this is just as dependent upon your understanding of grammar. In so many ways you are only as good as your grammar.
Few would dispute that this is the Age of Communication. Its message is that the media are expanding exponentially. You can respond to the challenges and demands, or you can allow it to pass you by.
By reading this far, you appear to have chosen the former course. That’s courageous, and you should feel encouraged. If, however, you remain unsure or sceptical, proceed to the next section which should demonstrate to you that you probably know quite a bit more about grammar than you ever imagined.
And that will be a great start to mastering this essential and exciting skill.
You know more about grammar than you think
Yes, you really do know more about grammar than you think. You may not know what a prepositional complement is or what it does, and may never have heard of subordinator conjunctions or modal auxiliaries – and why on earth should you?
But from an early age you acquired a knowledge of grammar that saw you through your elementary and primary schooling. Whether your memories of what you were taught about grammar are fresh or distantly hazy, pleasant or mordantly painful, a surprising amount of grammatical know-how is parked somewhere in your memory. By reading and listening to others, you added to your knowledge and developed further grammatical skills. Thus you will find that this book will often merely explain and clarify what you already intuitively know about the principles and usage of grammar.
To prove this to yourself, try the following test, consisting of twenty examples of right and wrong use of the language. Record your answers by ticking the appropriate boxes. And here’s a tip before you begin: although some grammar rules may seem harebrained, most follow logical, commonsense principles. Rather than try to analyse the examples, try to ‘listen’ to what is being said.
| 1. | One of these isn’t a proper sentence. Which one is? | |
| A. | Any failure
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