From a Swedish Reader on Amazon.com

For many years, I have been searching for a well-written and well-structured book on English grammar, but only in vain. None of them met my expectations. Until now! Good's book is not only well written, it is also simple, lucid, and comprehensive....

This is truly an excellent book. No other book on the market is nearly as good as this one. I strongly recommend it to all people who want to improve their grammatical skills.

Testimonials

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DavidKirk.org

"English is my second language. For years, I struggled to find a systematic way to write with clarity. I attended a writing course Ed Good presented at Philips Electronics in Shanghai. In less than a week, he taught us an easy-to-follow system to spot and cure weaknesses in our writing style. Now this invaluable system is available in digital format. Anyone who writes will find GrammarRight enjoyable and useful."

Jason Kwan
IP Counsel
Philips Electronics
Hong Kong

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Legal Recruiter
BCG Attorney Search
Washington, D.C.

English Grammar

There are all sorts of people in the world when it comes to languages. On the one extreme, there are those that consider themselves to be expert users of a language and insist on correcting every person they come across on their English grammar. On the other extreme, there are those people (not always second-language speakers) who take a language, beat it up, and leave it whimpering in an alleyway. Most people fall in between these two extremes and for the most part get on with their lives without ever really thinking about what they are saying or how they are saying it.

But for those people who live on the extreme of supreme correctness, life can be a very trying ordeal. When a person has the knowledge of all the rules of a language like English and have come to grips with every small nuance of English grammar, then the trouble starts. It is not a conscious thing, but these wordsmiths cannot help but notice the little mistakes all around them. The wordsmith can ignore lots of little mistakes and move on after silently correcting them. But the big mistakes are out there for the whole world to see, and they make any knowledgeable person want whip out the proverbial red pen and fix them.

The blunders of random advertising aside, English-grammar purists can be very trying at times. This is especially apparent when one meets a British speaker and an American speaker. The sparks that fly when these two meet is often something very interesting to see. Few people who deal with English as an international language on a daily basis may be aware of the differences between what has come to be called British English, or in the old days it was known as the "Queen's English," and American English, or in more derogatory terms "Yank Speak." Truth be known, most people could not care less about the difference. If the language makes sense, why quibble over it?

The difference between British English and American English has two sides. The rules on English Grammar differ slightly, but the spelling, in many cases, differs vastly. An example is the use of the comma (,) before the word "and" in a list. British English has what's called the "Oxford comma." It comes before the "and" in a list of three or more items. In America, most major newspapers do not use the Oxford comma. Instead, they omit the comma before the "and" in a list of three or more, unless the items in the list are considered to be "complex." But the major style manuals in America do use the Oxford comma. The leading American book on plain writing, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, uses the Oxford comma. In America, it's called the "serial-comma rule."

Other differences between British English and American English show up in spelling. Many people may have noticed the difference in the spelling of words like "color" (American) and "colour" (British) or "specialize" (American) and "specialise" (British).

The reasons for these differences in spelling are not clear to everyone. The experts, no doubt, can tell the whole story of where it all started and why. Whatever the case may be, American English and British English do differ on various points, and some people get very sticky over the differences.