Understanding English Grammar: A New Way to Study the Grammar of English

Since the study of writing is closely linked to the study of grammar, the book Understanding English Grammar should be a good supplemental text in any writing class.In grade school, students acquire some understanding of grammatical terms. Most study parts of speech and classification of sentences-such as simple, compound, complex and compound-complex. Many also learn to recognize declarative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences. In junior high, they often study clauses-adverb, adjective, etc.-and may study phrases: such as prepositional and verbal-infinitive, participle and gerund.In senior high, students also often diagram sentences. While diagramming is helpful in understanding grammatical relationships, it often seems, to the student, to fragment the sentence and serves more to confuse that to enlighten. Understanding English Grammar uses a new approach that clearly explains how every word or word group relates to all elements in every sentence. Understanding the grammar of sentences can help students become better readers and writers.

Paul Aamot taught writing classes for 35 years-13 in senior high schools and 22 in a small college. Most of the writing texts available when he began teaching used grammatical terms in the study of writing. He felt, however, that the way these grammatical terms were used in most of these writing texts were often chaotic and confusing. So, he worked out a new way to study the grammar of English. The result was this book-Understanding English Grammar, A new way to study the grammar of English.Mr. Aamot is a World War II veteran who has a BA in English and a Master's degree in education. He took some post graduate courses in journalism and worked as a journalist several summers when he was a high school teacher.After he retired from teaching, he wrote a book on government and economics-Left-Right Confusion-published by Authorhouse, Bloomington, Indiana. He is active in several English teacher associations and gives workshops on the teaching of writing.