|(CCollins| Good Grammar Graham King HarperCollinsPublishersHarperCollinsPublishers Wescerhill Road, Bishopbriggs, Glasgow G64 20T wwwcollins.co.uk First published 2000 as Collins Wordpower Good Grammar This edition published 2004 Reprint 109876543210 © 2000, 2004 Estate of Graham King Cartoons by Hunt ISBN 0 90 717294 X A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved. No part of this publication tay be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding er cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this, condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher. ‘Typeset by Davidson Pre-Press Graphics Ltd, Glasgow G3. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Contents The Thirteen Gremlins of Grammar Graham King Introduction ‘What is Grammar? Why use it? You know more about grammar than you think: Test rammar Test Answers and Scorecard Let’s look at Sentences The building blocks of sentences: Parts of Speech Naming things: Nouns You, me and other Pronouns Is a plane! It’s a bird! No! It’s Superverbt Describing things: Adjectives and Adverbs Grammatical glue: Determiners, Conjunctions, Prepositions Punctuation: What's the point? Punctuation: Devices for separating and joining Punctuation: Symbols of meaning Writing good English: The Elements of Style Index 4 20 25 48. 64 7 95 0 B83 155 158 183 23410 R B The Thirteen Gremlims of Grammar Correct speling is essential Don’t use no double negatives. Verbs has got to agree with their subjects Don't write run-on sentences they are hard to read About them sentence fragments Don’t use commas, that aren't necessary. A preposition is not a good word to end a sentence with. Remember to not ever split infinitives. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. Always use apostrophe’s correctly. Make each singular pronoun agree with their antecedents. Join clauses good, like a conjunction should. Proofread your writing to make sure you don't words ut And, above all, avoid clichés like the plague. GRAHAM KiNG (1930-1999) Graham King was born in Adelaide on October 16, 1930, He trained as a cartographer and draughtsman before joining Rupert Murdock’s burgeoning media empire in the 1960s, where he became one of Murdoch’s leading marketing figures during the hard-fought Australian newspaper circulation wars of that decade. Graham King moved to London in 1969, where his marketing strategy transformed the Suit newspaper into the United Kingdom’s bestselling tabloid; subsequently, after 1986, he successfully promoted the reconstruction of The Sunday Times as a large multi-section newspaper. A poet, watercolourist, landscape gardener and book collector, Graham King also wrote a biography of Zola, Garden of Zola (1978) and several weillers such as Killtest (1978). Other works include the novel The Pandora Valley (1973), a semii- autobiographical account of the hardships endured by the Australian unemployed and their families set in the 1930s, In the early 1990s, inspired by the unreadability and impracticality of many of the guides 4 Englist. usage in bookshops, Graham King developed the concept of a series of reference guides called The One-Hour Wordpower series: accessible, friendly guides designed to guide the reader through. the maze of English usage. He later expanded and revised the texts to create an innovative series of English usage guides that would break new ground in their accessibility and usefulness. The new range of reference books became the Collins Wordpower series, the first four titles being published in March 2000, the second four in May 2000. Graham King died in May 1999, shortly after completing the Collins Wordpower series.