Work through this Moodle website to help you master grammar. You will build from understanding the role of each word in a sentence to writing a variety of sentences to make your writing come to life.

Step One: The Eight Parts of Speech

Basic grammar begins with knowing the eight parts of speech. You may already know these; if so, do the quick review and then take the pretest.

Step Two: Identification of Subject and Predicate

This section begins identifying the parts of the sentence. Read over the web page below before you take the pretest.

Step Three: Five Simple Sentence Patterns

You've seen from the previous section that a sentence may simply contain a subject and a verb to be complete. However, writers need a variety of sentence structures to make their writing interesting. We will start with five basic sentence patterns. Work through the first two resources, then complete the assignment.

Step Four: Phrases

You've learned some simple sentence patterns; now, it's time to add to those patterns to build more complex sentences.  Phrases include prepositional (adjectival, adverbial) participle, gerund, infinitive, and appositive.

Step Five: Clauses

Moving on to clauses, we will study independent and subordinate clauses.

Step Six: Sentence Structure

Now that you understand phrases and clauses, we will discover that sentences are classified according to the number and kinds of clauses within them.

Step Seven: Fragments/Run-ons

Identifying and revising problems with sentence fragments and run-ons.

Step Eight: Pronouns Problems

Sometimes we can "hear" which pronoun we should use in a sentence. Other times, we need to use our knowledge from previous topics to figure out the correct pronoun to use.

Step Nine: Subject-Verb Agreeent

In a correctly written sentence, the subject and verb agree in number. Singular subjects have singular verbs, and plural subjects have plural verbs.