Gwynne's Grammar The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English - epub [a0b10c110]

Gwynne's Grammar The Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English



Anxious about apostrophes?

In a pickle over your pronouns and prepositions?

Fear not—Mr. Gwynne is here with his wonderfully concise and highly enjoyable book of grammar.

Within these pages, adults and children alike will find all they need to rediscover this lost science and sharpen up their skills.

Mr. Gwynne believes that happiness depends at least partly on good grammar—and Mr. Gwynne is never wrong.



Product Details



Language: English

ISBN-10: 038535293X

ISBN-13: 978-0385352932



Reviews





Let us ignore for the moment that this book is essentially a plagiarized copy of William Strunk's 1918 Elements of Style and strive to look past the author's audacity to his aspirations. If you are inclined to agree with Mr. Gwynne that preservation of the English language is necessary to keep Western Civilization from destroying itself, then you may find (as I did) that his voice lends a passion to the text in the same way that an evangelist can enliven a dry part of the Old Testament. For me, then, a weary soul fearful of a generation raised on acronyms and autocorrect, four stars.



Have you seen the way school children hold their pens or pencils these days? It is as if they are holding a dagger. Have you read what these children write? It is as if they had just plunged that dagger into your back. (That is… if you love the English language.)



N. M. Gwynne is doing his best to rescue us from this tragedy but I fear he is too late. Teachers today are opposed to teaching grammar, preferring to leave the development of language skills to the innate brilliance of their students, and often pointing out that languages change; and the only languages that don’t change are the dead languages…Latin, Classical Greek etc. The good professor points out to these folks that except for the addition of new words to the English vocabulary, the English language has remained pretty much unchanged for several hundred years. This is quite true and quite extraordinary. It permits the people who are living today to read and understand and appreciate the writing and lives of people who lived in the past. And a language that can achieve that deserves our deep respect.



I had previously owned a copy of “Gwynne’s Latin.” I fear that copy is lost. But I located a wonderful video of professor Gwynne on Tu Tubus. (“You Tube” for those of you who don’t speak Latin.) It shows the professor teaching Latin to a wonderful group of young people in a school somewhere in the U.K. He is an old fashioned disciplinarian: the “Memorize, memorize, memorize” type. And the students love it. I am convinced, having gone through this kind of formal instruction myself as a child, that this is the best way to teach.