If you want something thorough and clinical in approach, something with numerous useful diagrams, try Betty Schrampf Azar's Understanding and Using English Grammar. It's written for classroom use and has lots of exercises you won't need (unless you're working through the book with 30 of your closest friends), but it includes everything and explains everything. For weeks, I searched for a grammar handbook I could recommend to my students, and this was the only suitably user-friendly one I found that even mentioned the subjunctive. Azar's approach is to advise you to do the most correct thing, always.
Karen Elizabeth Gordon's approach is to tell you what you can get away with, and to urge you to get away with it. For an adult writer of fiction, especially a native speaker of English with decent ear training, The Transitive Vampire and The Well-Tempered Sentence are adequate refresher courses on the rules, and Gordon's examples are hilarious sentences. They're not really suitable for children, though--all that salacious deployment of clip-art collage!--and they're not designed to be user-friendly for teaching.
It's not embarrassing. If I weren't teaching grammar, I wouldn't remember how to explain what my ear knows, either.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-11-16 03:42 pm (UTC)Karen Elizabeth Gordon's approach is to tell you what you can get away with, and to urge you to get away with it. For an adult writer of fiction, especially a native speaker of English with decent ear training, The Transitive Vampire and The Well-Tempered Sentence are adequate refresher courses on the rules, and Gordon's examples are hilarious sentences. They're not really suitable for children, though--all that salacious deployment of clip-art collage!--and they're not designed to be user-friendly for teaching.
It's not embarrassing. If I weren't teaching grammar, I wouldn't remember how to explain what my ear knows, either.