INTRODUCTION Hey, word nerd: I know your secret. You’re a natural at language. You’re the person friends ask to read their resumes, their school papers, their cover letters. You have a sixth sense for grammar, and on top of your innate ability, you’ve amassed quite a bit of knowledge along the way. Maybe another language savant in the family set you on the path. Maybe you went out of your way to learn the difference between
who and
whom, the meaning of
dangling participle, or how to choose between
lay and
lie.
You’re good at this stuff, better than almost anyone you know, but you have a dark secret: There are holes in your knowledge. Big ones. Despite all that natural ability and hard-earned learning, you feel that you never got a good, solid foundation in grammar. Sentence mechanics remain a mystery to you. You’d be surprised to learn that
tomorrow is an adverb and you’re not clear why
I feel bad is the grammatical choice over
I feel badly. Worst of all, you’re not quite sure what to do about it. You can’t go back to high school. You certainly can’t go back to a better high school than the one you attended. And every resource you’ve sought out let you down. The “help” you found was either too painfully dry to compete with whatever was on HBO or it was just more of the same grammar tidbits you already know.
Well, here’s some joyous news: I wrote this book for you.
It’s real grammar, the kind that you’d otherwise need a linguistics degree to acquire. But it’s designed specifically for word nerds who find that learning grammar, when it’s done just right, can be a real joy.
Copyright © 2018 by June Casagrande. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
