About the Book
Understanding English Grammar, 9th Edition, is a textbook that teaches native English speakers how English works. The book’s goal is help English speakers know how to better control the language they already know by understanding the fundamentals of grammatical rules. The authors state in the preface: “[Many native English speakers are] unable to to descrtibe what they do when they string words together, and they don’t know what has happened when the encounter or produce unclear, imprecise, or ineffective speech and writing.” This is an advanced book on grammar and sentence mechanics that seeks to address this issue and make English speakers better writers.
Authors: Martha Kolln and Robert Funk
Publisher: Pearson
Cost: about $132 on Amazon
ISBN: 978-0321891266
What I Liked
Kolln and Funk’s book is a very thorough examination of the English language and it provides an in-depth look at how the fundamentals of our language are developed. Far more than a simple grammar resource book, this book is the most thorough book I have seen created for native English speakers at the college level. Every chapter is organized into sections that provide exercises and all the exercise answers are in the back of the book.
What I Didn’t Like
The book spends an extensive amount of time diagramming sentences without clear explanation of how to actually diagram them. A reader will, after much analysis, be able to (sort of) gather how the authors are diagramming the sentences, but no explicit explanation is provided. The book is also incredibly dense and far too jargon-heavy. Even my most astute Master’s students find the book to be overwhelmingly caught up in grammatical jargon that detracts from the authors’ ability to be clear. Some explanations are contradictory and the glossary will send students in circles (defining one word by another and vice versa). With some patience, this book is laden with valuable information that even college professors should study and review. However, the material is presented poorly and students struggle mightily with the content as it is presented. Students, by and large from my experience, hate the book. Many struggled understanding some of the fundamental concepts, like the difference between adverbial prepositional phrases and adjectivals. The book struggles significantly to understand its audience. The jargon often assumes that an advanced linguist is reading the book, yet the content suggests an AP high school or early college writing students are using it. Ironically, in a book about writing to make information clearer, this book is surprisingly difficult to follow for most students.
How I Used It
I used this book in a Master’s level basic editing course. Students would use the book to learn sentence structure and grammatical rules, then apply what they learned to written essays.