What if I told you that you could learn basic English grammar rules in just 6 minutes?
Freely available podcasts, available each week to download from the BBC, tackle a fundamental aspect of English Grammar and dismantle, demystify, give examples and even test you – all in 6 minutes. English Grammar is certainly not easy but these help to demystify adverbs, differentiate past, present and continuous tense and look at the subtle difference between ‘must’ and ‘have to’.
QUT Library also has numerous resources on the topics of grammar and punctuation. These are a selection of our resources that make the topic a little easier to digest in an easy-to-read, simple, jaunty way!
Eats, shoots and leaves / Lynne Truss. This book isn’t about the eating habits of pandas, but rather a lighthearted look at the importance and rules regarding grammar and punctuation. The title is derived from a (bad?) joke about bad punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“Well, I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.“
Grammar Girl presents the ultimate writing guide for students / Mignon Fogarty Grammar GIrl (aka Mignon Fogarty) has won multiple awards for her free podcasts on all things grammar, language, writing and punctuation Some of her most popular topics include: Affect versus effect; I.e versus E.g and Fish or Fishes?
The briefest punctuation guide ever! / Ruth Colman. Not sure when you should start a new sentence? Or whether a comma should go before or after a word? Or if you should use an apostrophe or not?This guide answers all the basics in only 43 pages.
Perhaps getting ‘grammar savvy’ isn’t as time consuming as you thought?
