This book is a complete course in English grammar, organized in four parts of increasing difficulty. It is designed to work both as a course you can read from start to finish and as a reference you can dip into when you need to check a specific point.
The four levels
The essential building blocks: nouns, articles, pronouns, the verb , the simple tenses, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and how to form questions and negatives. Corresponds roughly to CEFR A1–A2.
The full tense–aspect system, modal verbs, conditionals, the passive, verb patterns, relative clauses, reported speech, comparison, and phrasal verbs. Corresponds roughly to CEFR B1–B2.
Subtleties of tense and aspect, mixed and inverted conditionals, the subjunctive, inversion and cleft sentences, participle clauses, nominalization, ellipsis, cohesion, and causatives. Corresponds roughly to CEFR C1.
The grammar of the expert user: syntactic analysis, information structure, agreement edge cases, hedging and academic register, punctuation mastery, structural ambiguity, and the great usage debates. Corresponds to CEFR C2 and beyond — much of this material is useful even to native speakers who write professionally.
Features
Key Point boxes summarize the rule you must remember.
Common Error boxes show typical mistakes (marked ) next to correct forms (marked ).
Usage Notes cover differences between British and American English, formal and informal usage, and points where real usage is more flexible than school rules suggest.
Style & Register boxes help you choose the right form for the right situation, especially in writing.
Exercises appear at the end of every chapter, with a full Answer Key in Appendix [app:answers].
Appendices provide a table of irregular verbs and a glossary of grammatical terms.
A note on “correctness”
Grammar books sometimes present English as a fixed set of rules. Real English is a living language: educated usage varies between regions, registers, and generations. Where usage genuinely varies, this book says so, and tells you what is safest in careful writing. Where a “rule” is really a superstition (for example, the ban on split infinitives), this book tells you that too — in Chapter [ch:usage].