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Introduction

Most people seem to think that using a language is all about choosing words. It isn't. You could know every word in the dictionary and still not be able to say anything. You need to be able to form sentences. That means following grammatical rules. The grammar of a language is simply the system governing the way in which its sentences are put together. And different languages do it in different ways.

This book concentrates on how sentences are put together, not on words or their meanings and uses. It's not my job to tell you whether or not you should use the noun impact as a verb. My job is to make sure you know exactly what that means: what nouns and verbs are, and what roles they can (or cannot) play in sentences. Then you can decide whether to write This could impact your life (with impact as a verb) or This could have an impact on your life (with impact as a noun). Journalistic prose seems to use will have an impact on the three or four times as often as will impact the, but clearly both are in use by professional writers. It's your decision.

I find it really sad that so many well-educated English speakers are unable to trust their own judgment; they fear that their knowledge of grammar will betray them - that some ill-placed adverb or preposition or participle will expose them to ridicule. They imagine that rules of grammar are laid down in authoritative grammar books somewhere with the sole purpose of catching you out, and you have to obey them.

Sadder still, many such fears are mostly groundless. Certainly there are rules of English grammar - thousands of them, often highly tricky and complex to state - but users of English already obey most of the rules unconsciously. They draw on their tacit, internalized knowledge of English grammar every day whenever they speak, write, or understand anything. They couldn't say what the rules are explicitly, of course, any more than they could name all the bones in their hands, but their grasp of the rules is unconscious, almost like an instinct. We all make occasional slips of the tongue or the keyboard that we didn't intend, but mostly we know how to say things in English without much prompting.

Yet many people believe total falsehoods about grammar. They trust in rules they think they recall from some high school English class but couldn't state with any clarity now. What drives this strange phenomenon? Why should lifelong English speakers be afflicted by fear of nonexistent rules? It's mainly due to the existence of thousands of over-conservative usage books, how-to-write websites, and grammar-checking apps. Plenty of the material repeated in works by purported English grammar experts is just wrong. Their descriptions are clumsy, if not false, and the edicts and prohibitions they dispense are sometimes fictional.

I'm not saying there aren't any rules, and I'm not saying you can ignore the rules. There may be some creative writing teachers who are so liberally inclined that they say there are no rules at all about writing, but I don't think they can possibly mean it. Of course there are rules. Loads of rules. If I didn't follow the usual rules of English word order, then figure almost find I saying it out to impossible totally was what would you.

Let me repeat that last bit, this time obeying the rules of English: If I didn't follow the usual rules of English word order, then you would find it almost totally impossible to figure out what I was saying.

Those last fourteen words could be arranged in any of 87,178,291,200 different orders, hardly any of which are grammatically permitted. As far as I can see, only one correctly expresses the meaning I intended. Choosing any of the other 87,178,291,199 creates either some sort of error or else (in most cases) complete gibberish that no one could understand. So do not imagine I'm saying we can lighten up and ignore the rules. I'm saying we have to get straight on what the rules are.

Grammar and style

Knowing something about the grammar of the world's most important language (that's undeniably the status of English) can be useful for anyone. First, it's interesting to see something of the complexity of a system you have already largely mastered, but second, understanding grammar is fundamental for understanding advice about writing style. Style is a matter of making effective use of the possibilities that the grammar makes available. And you simply cannot talk about style, or set about criticizing it or improving it, without employing basic grammatical concepts. Grammar underlies style in the way that anatomy underlies fashion design: you couldn't become an expert at designing clothes without knowing that a typical human has arms, legs, elbows, knees, and feet.

What a grammar describes is not the qualities that define literary style. This book does not talk much about avoidable clichés, deprecated words, informal expressions, or weakness of rhetoric. That sort of thing, though appealing to many, is often highly subjective and influenced by passing fashions. Grammar is about the principles that determine whether some sequence of words is a sentence at all. The reason I've written this book is that for two or three centuries writers on the topic have analyzed grammar badly and explained it in antiquated, clunky, or totally mistaken ways. Confused dogma has been handed down from teacher to teacher since the 18th century, and repeated in books that often shamelessly plagiarize each other and repeat each other's mistakes.

It's an oft-repeated maxim that a truly experienced writer who understands style can risk breaking the rules. But I'm not talking about breaking rules. I'm interested in what the rules should say, and I'm warning you that most of the books on how to write English are loaded with supposed rules or prohibitions obeyed by nobody, whether expert or not. Take the case of the ridiculous advice, found in numerous books on how to write well, that you should avoid adjectives and adverbs. My point is not that when you're an established writer you can occasionally be allowed to risk the occasional adjective or adverb. I'm saying that the people who tell you not to use adjectives or adverbs in your writing are time-wasters and they don't know what they're talking about.

My plan is not to waste your time (which is why I've kept this book as short as I could). I will assume that you're serious about writing material in English that other people will read (that's obvious: if you're writing just for yourself, it simply won't matter how you write); that you haven't studied grammar in any depth before, so you aren't necessarily acquainted with all the technical terms grammarians use (I'll explain the ones I need simply, as and when they come up); and that you don't have endless hours to spend on the topic so you don't want arcane details, historical digressions, cutesy jokes, or childish cartoons.

What style you should adopt in your writing depends on who your intended readers might be. That I cannot know. You might be writing for an audience of one, like the teacher or professor who's going to grade your next term paper, or the editor of a magazine in which you're hoping to be published, or the boss for whom you have to write reports and memos. Or you might be writing for a small circle of fans on social media, or a few hundred readers of a blog, or the thousands of customers to whom you have to send business communications, or the millions of readers in the great wide world of literature who purchase your breakthrough debut novel. I won't make any assumptions about such things.

My task in this book is to tell you the truth about contemporary English grammar, rather than pass along the familiar old views of it that most grammar books repeat as if they were scripture.

Did you ever see the 1992 film A Few Good Men? There's a classic scene where the brutal Colonel Jessep (Jack Nicholson) has been ranting about what it takes to keep America safe, and is being needled under cross-examination by a prosecuting attorney (Tom Cruise) who demands that he should tell the court martial the truth. Jessep loses his temper and yells: "You can't handle the truth!" Well, I'm going to assume you can handle the truth.

Too much of what has been written about English is false, or at least two hundred years past its use-by date. For a long time the unreliability of the published literature on English grammar has needed a positive alternative that makes better sense. It horrifies me to see how bad most grammar books are. I feel like a biologist marooned in a world where most medical science books make no reference to the circulation of the blood, and show no awareness of bacteria or viruses. Because, make no mistake about it, if physicians were typically as incompetent in anatomy and biology as how-to-write books are in grammar, you'd probably be dead.

I mean that literally. The germ theory of disease hadn't even begun to take hold in 1800. People thought epidemics were caused by foul-smelling mists. The state of the art in grammar at that time was a million-selling book on English grammar by Lindley Murray (1795, heavily influenced by and sometimes plagiarized from Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to...