Grammar by Diagram: Understanding English Grammar Through Traditional Sentence Diagramming - Softcover

Vitto, Cindy L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551114577 ISBN 13: 9781551114576

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2003

Synopsis

Grammar by Diagram is a book designed for use as a textbook at the college or advanced high school level, or as a book for the educated general reader who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Organized into thirteen chapters and complete with answers for all exercises, the text begins with the traditional eight parts of speech and moves on to ten basic sentence patterns. Making use of traditional sentence diagramming, the book proceeds to explain how the ten basic sentence patterns can be expanded into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) can provide further versatility.

Chapters dealing with the structure of the English language and diagrams to illustrate that structure are interspersed with chapters dealing with usage. The text addresses the most frequent usage errors by explaining how to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs; how to avoid problems of pronoun case, agreement, and consistency; how to ensure that verbs will agree with their subjects and will be appropriate in terms of tense, aspect, voice, and mood; and how to phrase sentences to avoid errors in parallelism or placement of modifiers. The concluding chapters deal with punctuation, capitalization, and the use of structures such as the cleft sentence, the sentence appositive, and the nominative absolute.

About this title

From the Back Cover

Grammar by Diagram, second edition is a book designed for anyone who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Using traditional sentence diagraming as a visual tool, the book explains how to expand simple sentences into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how to employ verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) and other structures for additional variety.

The text addresses the most frequent usage errors by explaining how to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs; how to avoid problems of pronoun case, agreement, and consistency; how to ensure that verbs will agree with their subjects and will be appropriate in terms of tense, aspect, voice, and mood; and how to phrase sentences to avoid errors in parallelism or placement of modifiers. Six appendices incorporate further exercises, a summary of key basics from the text, and supplemental material not included in the body of the text but useful for quick reference. This new edition includes additional exercises and has been revised and updated throughout.

About the Author

Cindy L. Vitto is a Professor of English at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey, where she has taught medieval literature and American English Grammar since 1989. She is the co-editor of New Perspectives on Criseyde (forthcoming from Pegasus Press), The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideals of Order and their Decline (University of Floriday, 1994), and the author of The Virtuous Pagan in Middle English Literature (American Philosophical Society, 1989).

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1551114577
• ISBN 13: 9781551114576
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 428