Dear Geist,
What are your five favourite references for English grammar?
—Tanis, Corner Brook NL
Dear Tanis,
For most aspects of English grammar—that is, the way we describe the form and structure of spoken and written language—there is no official authority or set of rules. Yup, it’s true, regardless of what your grade 5 teacher told you. Standards and conventions have evolved (and go on evolving) so that we can understand each other, but they vary depending on context. So we’re glad you asked for five references and not just one!
The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed., or latest ed.) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Or online edition.
The Copyeditor’s Handbook (3rd ed., or latest ed.), Amy Einsohn (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2011).
Writing English: The Canadian Handbook, William E. Messenger, et al. (Don Mills ON: Oxford University Press, 2011 [or latest edition]).
Understanding English Grammar (9th ed., or latest ed.), Martha Kolln and Robert Funk (New York: Pearson Education Inc., 2012).
Collins Cobuild English Grammar (3rd ed., or latest ed.) (Glasgow/NY: Collins, 2011).
Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming [Parsing] Sentences, Kitty Burns Florey (Orlando FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006).
Okay, that’s six. The last one is to prove that grammar is fun.
If you speak and/or write English, you already have an intuitive grasp of the structure of the spoken and/or written language; with print and online grammar references you can look under the hood and see how these familiar parts and processes fit together. The references above are comprehensive. You can get a fine introduction from any short basic grammar book written for children or new English speakers. (Deeper delving will take you to the land of shifting adverbials, uncountable nouns, free morphemes, metadiscourse. . .)
One more thing—a note of caution from the authors of Understanding English Grammar: “Error-free writing is not necessarily effective writing.”
—The Editors
