Grammar by Diagram is a book designed for use as a textbook at the college or advanced high school level, or as a book for the educated general reader who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Organized into thirteen chapters and complete with answers for all exercises, the text begins with the traditional eight parts of speech and moves on to ten basic sentence patterns. Making use of traditional sentence diagramming, the book proceeds to explain how the ten basic sentence patterns can be expanded into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) can provide further versatility.
Chapters dealing with the structure of the English language and diagrams to illustrate that structure are interspersed with chapters dealing with usage. The text addresses the most frequent usage errors by explaining how to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs; how to avoid problems of pronoun case, agreement, and consistency; how to ensure that verbs will agree with their subjects and will be appropriate in terms of tense, aspect, voice, and mood; and how to phrase sentences to avoid errors in parallelism or placement of modifiers. The concluding chapters deal with punctuation, capitalization, and the use of structures such as the cleft sentence, the sentence appositive, and the nominative absolute.
