English Grammar Boot Camp

Overview

Improve your grammar competence and confidence by learning the essential elements of English grammar and usage, led by an award-winning linguist.

Grammar! For many of us, the word triggers memories of finger-wagging schoolteachers and of wrestling with the ambiguous and complicated rules of using formal language. In fact, most of the grammar “rules” you think you know are not really rules at all, which is why there is often debate over common grammar issues.

In English Grammar Boot Camp, linguist and popular Great Courses professor Anne Curzan of the University of Michigan takes you on an enjoyable exploration of the essential aspects of English grammar. These 24 spirited and accessible lectures offer you a comprehensive core training—a linguistic “boot camp,” by which we mean a thorough immersion in all of the key elements of English grammar and usage, in their most immediate, practical application.

The delightful and superbly insightful lectures of English Grammar Boot Camp offer you a unique opportunity to explore the linguistic riches of the English language and to significantly deepen your mastery of grammar, usage, and style. This mastery will enable you to use English more competently and confidently in every context.

Course Structure

1. Why Do We Care about Grammar?
   Duration: 33 min
   Learn what conflict is, why it is inevitable even in successful relationships, and why dealing with it constructively is essential and beneficial.
2. Prescriptivism: Grammar Shoulds and Shouldn’ts
   Duration: 31 min
   Investigate prescriptive grammar and the history of specific grammatical rules.
3. Descriptivism: How Grammar Really Works
   Duration: 32 min
   Dive into descriptive grammar and observe the wealth of grammatical knowledge you know intuitively.
4. Re Phrasing
   Duration: 29 min
   Define and categorize words into parts of speech and understand their syntax.
5. Fewer Octopuses or Less Octopi?
   Duration: 31 min
   Investigate countable and uncountable nouns and their modifiers.
6. Between You and Your Pronouns
   Duration: 33 min
   Explore personal, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns and their complexities.
7. Which Hunting
   Duration: 29 min
   Learn the rules governing the use of “that” vs. “which.”
8. A(n) Historical Issue
   Duration: 30 min
   Understand determiners and their key functions in English.
9. Funnest Lecture Ever
   Duration: 30 min
   Study adjectives and their comparative and superlative forms.
10. Going, Going, Went
    Duration: 32 min
    Clarify past tense vs. past participle and explore irregularities.
11. Object Lessons
    Duration: 29 min
    Examine how we categorize verbs based on their function within a sentence.
12. Shall We?
    Duration: 35 min
    Explore auxiliary verbs and their usage in English.
13. Passive Voice Was Corrected
    Duration: 32 min
    Define the passive voice and its benefits in writing.
14. Only Adverbs
    Duration: 33 min
    Discover the rich world of adverbs and their functions.
15. No Ifs, Ands, or Buts
    Duration: 33 min
    Learn about conjunctions and their roles in sentences.
16. However to Use However
    Duration: 27 min
    Identify the range of conjunctive adverbs and their significance.
17. Squirrels and Prepositions
    Duration: 31 min
    Explore the use of prepositions and their common usage issues.
18. Stranded Prepositions
    Duration: 27 min
    Understand the debate around ending sentences with prepositions.
19. The Dangers of Danglers
    Duration: 31 min
    Investigate dangling modifiers and their implications.
20. Navigating the Choppy Paragraph
    Duration: 32 min
    Learn how to make your prose flow and avoid choppiness.
21. What Part of Speech is Um?
    Duration: 34 min
    Study the distinction between involved and informational discourse.
22. Duck, Duck, Comma, and Duck
    Duration: 33 min
    Review modern punctuation rules and their importance.
23. Its/It’s Confusing
    Duration: 31 min
    Examine apostrophe usage and common errors.
24. Trending Language
    Duration: 34 min
    Explore new grammatical expressions and their impact on language.