Modern English Grammar

ENGLISH 303: MODERN ENGLISH GRAMMAR (Fall 2019 TR Noon –1:15) MARK HEBERLE

This course will be useful and enjoyable for anyone who expects to be teaching English at any level, working as a writer or editor, or studying or understanding how language works. Our primary focus will analyzing sentence structure and recognizing the elements that make up such structures as well as generating and expanding our repertoire of such structures in our own writing. The course will make you a better student of the writing of others, but it will also make you a better writer yourself. The exercises, examples, and modeling of sentences and larger rhetorical structures that we will engage in will also explore important language-related areas of knowledge touched on in the five chapters of our textbook, including language and the brain, phonology (the sounds of language), sociolinguistics (dialect, media, globalization), language acquisition, and the history of English. By the end of this course, you will be able to recognize, analyze, and generate writing that is more correct, clear, readable, and powerful than what you may have been accustomed to before you took English 303.

Requirements Mandatory written homework, in-class exercises, class participation and attendance; cumulative quizzes on the five chapters of our textbook (from parts of speech to subordinate clauses), and a final examination.

Required text: Nancy M. Sullivan, Essential Grammar for Today’s Writers, Students, and Teachers (Routledge, 2015)