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I am a high school English teacher who loves to read, and I'm passionate about finding quality books for my students to read. The reviews on this blog will reflect what I am currently reading and sometimes what my students are reading. The books that appear on the list are ones that I think would be of interest to high school students, are age appropriate in content and difficulty, and in some way tap into eternal truths. Most are classics, but some are just fun, popular books.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Laugh Your Way Through Grammar

Chances are that by the time you have reached high school, you have had enough formal grammar. You probably have a good notion of what the parts of speech are, even if you can't name all of them. Your time would be best used at this point finding the holes in your grammatical education and filling them without wasting time on things you already know. Laugh Your Way through Grammar by Joan D. Berbrich is the best book for finding your weaknesses and correcting them.
The first part of this book has practice sessions in which you read sentences and try to determine the errors in them. At the end of each sentence is a parenthetical note that leads you to the grammatical rule in the second part of the book. The sentences in the front and the examples that follow the rules in the back are mostly either odd bits of fact ("A flea can jump twelve inches, twelve inches for a flea is equal to two football fields for a person five feet tall"), witty statements ("Timid people are sheeps in sheep's clothing"), puns ("Sunday is the strongest day of the week because all the rest are 'weak' days"), or funny jokes ("He went to the drive-in bank to show his car to it's real owner"). Grammar becomes fun!
If I were a student using the book, I would do the practice sessions, checking the rules on the sentences I was unsure of. I would also place a mark by the sentences I was unsure of so I could come back to them easily later before taking the PSAT, SAT, and ACT.I don't think this book is in print anymore. What are the schools and the publishers thinking? You can still get a copy for cheap on Amazon though. I highly recommend this book. As one of the practice sentences says, you don't want your "grammer to be as horrendous as your spelling."

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