Grammar Refresher

About This Course

Whatever your goals, a grasp of English grammar is important if you want to improve your speaking and writing skills. This course will help you gain confidence in your ability to produce clean, grammatically correct work. You'll explore the basics of English grammar—like sentence structure and punctuation—as well as more sophisticated concepts—like logic and clarity. A patient instructor, memorable lessons, vivid examples, and interactive exercises will give you ample opportunity to put what you learn into practice. Reacquaint yourself with old, forgotten rules, meet some new ones, and discover your own grammatical strengths.

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Ellen Feld.

Ellen Feld holds a master of arts degree in writing from The Johns Hopkins University and has taught several classroom and online college writing courses over the past 30 years, including creative writing, developmental writing, and English composition. Ellen has worked as a newspaper reporter and copy chief, personal essayist, Web site reviewer, and writer of computer-based training courseware. Her children's book, Paragon and Jubilee, was published by Edgecliff Press in March 2010.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

In this first lesson, you'll start by meeting your instructor and getting comfortable in your new online classroom. Then you'll reacquaint yourself with parts of speech. You might have heard about pronouns and conjunctions or prepositions and interjections, but do you have any idea what these things are? What is an adverb, anyway? You'll find out in this lesson as you begin to organize a bunch of words into a complete sentence.

Friday - Lesson 02

It’s time to learn about some tricky words that often get confused because they sound alike. In this lesson, you'll begin to spot mix-ups such as have/of, lie/lay, and there/their. This will pave the way to learning which is the right word for the sentence you want to write.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

In this lesson, you'll master the mighty apostrophe, a tiny punctuation mark that has a big job to do. We'll look at how it's used to combine words and express ownership. Building on what you know about mix-ups, you'll find out when and where the apostrophe belongs, and why it sometimes doesn't.

Friday - Lesson 04

Every sentence needs a subject and a predicate, so it's important to know what they are and how to find them. In this lesson, you'll learn what is and isn't a subject and a predicate, and you'll master the basics of sentence structure.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

Get ready to master sentence fragments. In this lesson, you'll see how bits and pieces can masquerade as a whole. You'll learn to recognize when a collection of words doesn't quite measure up to a real sentence. Then you'll be able to attach those words to their missing part or find a way to rewrite them so that they can stand up on their own.

Friday - Lesson 06

Some of us just like to keep going and going and going. In this lesson, you'll learn how to stop. You'll learn a variety of ways to keep one independent clause from running into another and give your readers a chance to catch their breath.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

It's time to make sure you're the boss of your verbs. You'll see how the concepts of yesterday, today, and tomorrow can change a verb. Once you know your past, present, and future, you'll take a look at some other ideas that shape verbs, such as person, number, voice, and mood.

Friday - Lesson 08

Some of them are small in size, like we and I, but as a group, they're large in number. Get ready to put you and me and he and she and this and that (and lots more) under a microscope. You'll learn about the different kinds of pronouns and how some of them change depending on what they're doing in a sentence.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

It's time to take the argument out of your grammar. In this lesson, you'll apply what you've learned about subjects, verbs, and pronouns and find out how to make them all agree with one another. The result will be grammatical harmony.

Friday - Lesson 10

In this lesson, you'll learn how to stay on the straight and narrow grammatical path. You'll begin to recognize inconsistencies. And you'll see how to create a steady narrative system by choosing a person, a time, and a structural method to organize your words, phrases, and clauses.

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Everything you've learned in the course so far has been leading to this lesson. Now you're ready to ensure your writing says what you want it to say. You'll learn how to express yourself in the appropriate language, with no wasted words. And you'll use logic to inspire your own good grammar.

Friday - Lesson 12

Every piece of written work, great or small, needs its i's dotted. In our final lesson, you'll spend some time refreshing your memory on those long-forgotten rules of capitalization. At last, you'll distinguish between colons and semicolons, and parentheses and dashes. But we won't say goodbye until you're equipped with an editing checklist to keep in your back pocket.

Requirements

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader). Please note: This course teaches American English grammar. Also, this course is not designed for ESL students. If you are an ESL student, please consider enrolling in Grammar for ESL Students with Sabri Bebawi.