They didn't teach me at school
Grammar and punctuation
In most of the English-speaking world, schools stopped teaching grammar from the 1960s. Your best chance of getting a grip on the structure of English was to study a foreign language or linguistics. There were always people with a fascination for language who just had to find out for themselves. But the result of this educational fashion is that most English speakers have only a passing understanding of the way their own language works.
If pressed, a lot of people can identify nouns and verbs, but very few really know what an adverb is and as for gerunds or dangling participles, forget it.
Here's a secret. This large group of people includes a lot of editors.
It's perfectly possible to have a deep love of language and proficiency in its use without a matching understanding of its structure. As professional editors, though, it's not enough to say to a client who asks why you've recommended a grammatical change that 'it didn't sound right'. You need to know why.
This course sets out the basics and explains how to interpret grammatical issues.
In production
