Grammar and Usage

Grammar and Usage

In ancient Roman carvings, writers did not make use of punctuation, capitalization, or even spaces between words. Trying to read writing that doesn't make use of these conventions goes something like this:

Ifyouwanttocommunicateclearlyyouregoingtoneedtomakeeffectiveuseofpunctuation

Furthermoreifyouusepunctuationincorrectlyyourreaderswillthinkyouareeither

carelessorignorantsowhyshouldtheytakeyourwordforanything

Just adding spaces between the words helps some. Here, I'll show you:

If you want to communicate clearly youre going to need to make effective use of punctuation furthermore if you use punctuation incorrectly your readers will think you are either careless or ignorant so why should they take your word for anything

I think the spaces between the words really help. Adding periods between sentences and commas in the appropriate places makes things even clearer. Let's try the passage above again. This time I'll add periods, a question mark, capital letters, and commas. I'll even throw in an apostrophe.

If you want to communicate clearly, you're going to need to make effective use of punctuation. Furthermore, if you use punctuation incorrectly, your readers will think you are either careless or ignorant, so why should they take your word for anything?

As I hope you can see from the example above, the purpose of punctuation is to make writing clearer--not to annoy students or to give English teachers something to do on long, lonely winter nights.

What makes this punctuation stuff tricky is that our language is marvelously flexible. If we only wrote in simple sentences, punctuation would be pretty easy. But it would be harder to really express ourselves.

Unfortunately, studying punctuation is not all that exciting, at least to most people. Some people find it downright annoying. In the exercises that follow, I've tried to make some of the principles that underlie the rules of usage in English clear. The exercises are self-correcting. If you select the wrong answer, you'll get an X symbol. You'll also get an explanation of why your choice is incorrect. Be sure to go ahead and choose the right answer (even if there are only two possibilities); otherwise, the program won't keep your score accurately. Feel free to do the exercises before reading the accompanying instructions-I would. (In fact, I'm amazed you're still reading these instructions.) If you want to know more, you can consult the accompanying commentary.

My name is Roger Green, and I created this site. I'm an English teacher at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. You can reach me at (rgreen@lan.tjhsst.edu).

I created the exercises using Hot Potatoes software from the Humanities Computing and Media Centre of the University of Victoria and Half-Baked Software, Inc. The Hot Potatoes team is Stewart Arneil (Mac Programming), Martin Holmes (Windows Programming), and Hilary Street (Graphics).

You can choose the exercises you want to work on from the list below.

I. Conjunctions and Commas

An overview of Conjunctions

Compound Sentences and Compound Predicates (Verbs) Overview (Use of Coordinating Conjunctions)

Exercise #1 Sentences I made up.

Exercise #2 Sentences I made up about Odysseus.

Exercise #3 Sentences taken from student papers about local environmental issues.

Exercise #4 Sentences from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. These sentences are from the chapter in which the tyrannosaur attacks the Land Cruisers.

Exercise #5 Sentences from Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. These sentences are from the chapter in which Dennis Nedry is attacked by a dinosaur.

Exercise #6 Sentences from an article from The Washington Post about a Wizards victory.

Exercise #7 Sentences from The Human Comedy by William Saroyan.

Exercise #8 Sentences from "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell