I began learning English when I started middle school in Korea. I started to write exclusively in English when I began my career in the US as a graduate student in philosophy. I managed to write philosophy papers, but I wanted to write clearly and crisply. To do that, I decided to relearn English grammar since the grammar taught in Korea was far inadequate to construct good English sentences. I wanted to understand what makes good English sentences good. Luckily, I was able to study the renowned Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” and many other grammar books written by English natives. These books helped me understand some of my mistakes in sentence constructions. However, I also noticed that none of these books satisfactorily addressed problems that I was struggling with, such as “Should I use “the” or not with this noun?” or “Should this idea be expressed in a countable noun or uncountable noun?” Eventually, I learned that my questions are non-questions for the natives as natives do not make the-type-of grammar mistakes that I was making. Ironically, the grammar mistakes that some natives make were the ones that I knew even in middle school: e.g., I observed some natives’ saying “between you and I” instead of “between you and me.” I realized that, to solve my grammar questions, arising due to being a non-native speaker, I needed to write my own grammar book.
Since I wanted to make my sentences grammatically correct, all I needed to do was to make sure that all grammatically related items in a sentence agree with each other in grammatically relevant aspects. So for instance, the preposition phrase, “between you and I” is wrong because a preposition requires an objective case, but “I” is in a subjective case. When I conceived “grammar” in light of the agreement in related parts, the so-far tedious and often inconsistent grammar rules, 3,500 grammar rules according to some grammarians, can be categorized under just six essential principles of agreement as follows:
Noun-determiner agreement in specificity and countability
Noun-noun/noun-pronoun agreement in number and case
Subject-verb agreement in number
Verb tense agreement
Verb mood agreement
Modifier-modificand agreement
In this course, you learn English grammar rules that are undergirded by these six essential principles of agreement. This course is work in progress. Video lectures will be added weekly. This is the course syllabus.
Grammar Course Syllabus
Introduction
English syntax principles
Parts of speech
Elements of a sentence
Word order
Noun-determiner agreement
Introduction to the principle of noun-determiner agreement
Countable nouns vs uncountable nouns
Uncountable nouns used as countable nouns
Singular countable noun use
Definite article use
Idiomatic use of THE
Indefinite Quantifiers
Quantifiers used only with singular countable nouns
Quantifiers used only with plural countable nouns
Quantifiers used only with uncountable nouns
Quantifiers used both with plural countable nouns and with uncountable nouns
Determiner Order
Noun-noun/noun-pronoun agreement in number and case
Noun-noun agreement in number
Pronoun-antecedent agreement in number, gender and person
Agreement in case
Subject-predicate agreement in number
Identification of the subject
Always singular subject
Always plural subject
Singular or plural subject depending on the reference
Verb tense agreement
Simple tenses vs progressive tenses (or aspects)
Simple tenses vs perfect tenses
Tense sequence
Time clauses
Indefinite time markers with perfect tenses
Definite time markers with simple tenses
Tense back shifting
Tenses of verbals (infinitives, gerunds and participles)
Verb mood agreement
Types of moods
Subjunctive types
Subjunctive present necessary
Subjunctive past
Subjunctive past perfect
Mixed subjunctive
Real hypothetical vs unreal hypothetical
Modal auxiliary verbs
Deontic modality
Epistemic modality
Modifier-modificand agreement
Adjectival -- nominal agreement
Adverbial -- non-nominal agreement
Comparative and superlative use
Restrictive and non-restrictive modifiers
Participle phrases
Bad sentences
Wordy, choppy, or incorrectly-subordinated sentences
Misplaced modifiers
Dangling modifiers
Squinting modifiers
Faulty shift in person
Faulty shaft in tense
Faulty shift in mood
Faulty shift in voice
Faulty parallelism
Run-ons, fragments
Mixed construction
Incorrect use of punctuation marks