Grammar and Style Choices for College Writers

Description

This textbook provides a practical guide to grammar and style choices for college writers, giving students a basic vocabulary for thinking and talking about language use and enabling them to make purposeful choices in their writing. Each section includes a short overview of a grammatical topic accompanied by exercises for raising the students’ awareness of and skills in using specific grammatical structures. It focuses on the practical and rhetorical functions of grammatical structures as they are used in expository and analytic writing, rather than on de-contextualized grammatical rules. Students will develop a repertoire of grammatical choices and understand the strategic reasons for making these choices in their writing for various audiences. It particularly attends to the structures that present the most difficulty for college students from multilingual communities and communities where a non-standard dialect of English is used on a daily basis. This textbook can be used as a core textbook for grammar course as well as a supplementary text for composition courses. It is also suitable for courses tailored to multilingual, advanced non-native, or non-standard speakers of English. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Understanding Sentence Parts 1.1 What kinds of subjects can sentences have? 1.2 How do I make the verbs match the subjects of my sentences? 1.3 How do I add details to sentences? Notes Chapter 2 Using Effective Punctuation 2.1 What are the different kinds of sentences? 2.2 How do I punctuate sentences with equal clauses (compound sentences)? 2.3 How do I punctuate sentences with unequal clauses (complex sentences)? 2.4 How do I use punctuation to clarify or introduce examples? 2.5 How do I vary my sentence types in academic and professional writing? Note Chapter 3 Verbs: The Center of the Action 3.1 Which verb forms are most common? 3.2 Which verb forms should I use for reporting the work and ideas of others? 3.3 How do I manage verb forms in the flow of the text? 3.4 How can I show my attitude and stance through verb forms? 3.5 How can I use verbs to emphasize specific aspects of my message? Notes Chapter 4 Noun Groups: Tools for Complex Reading and Writing 4.1 Which nouns can be plural? When do nouns need a, an, or the? 4.2 Which noun groups should I use in academic and workplace writing? 4.3 How can I use noun groups to make generalizations? 4.4 How can I use pronouns for clear and fluent writing? Notes Chapter 5 Using Grammatical Tools for Clarity 5.1 How do I present ideas in a list or show ideas with equal importance? 5.2 How can I clarify my writing through the placement of modifiers? 5.3 How do I choose the right word forms? Notes Appendix A: Editing for Subject-Verb Agreement Appendix B: Editing for Verb Tense Consistency Appendix C: Editing for Punctuation Appendix D: Frequently Confused Words Index