English Composition and Grammar: Complete Course, Benchmark Edition

Book Preface

Now you are probably thinking, “Here we go again—another English class, another textbook.” You are, of course, quite right. Since almost everything you do involves the use of language, schools make the study of English a required subject in every year, and in any English class, a textbook is an essential tool.

This textbook is designed to help you master the skills required for the effective use of standard English. Although the book will help you to speak better, its primary purpose is to help you to write better.

You have been learning to write almost as long as you have been going to school, which, at this point, may seem to you to be a very long time. To be sure, you have already studied many composition skills. This book reviews those skills while it carries you further into the study of more advanced skills which lead to better writing.

As your experience increases, your ideas become more sophisticated and consequently more difficult to express. Additional skills are needed. This textbook provides instruction in these skills and the opportunity to practice their use. Practice is important because you learn to write by writing. No one ever learned to write in any other way.

Your textbook is also designed as a useful reference book: it offers the solution to almost any writing problem you are likely to encounter. By familiarizing yourself with the contents and organization of the book, and by using the index freely, you can easily find out what you need to know, whether it is a question about punctuation or usage or sentence structure, or a suggestion about the form of an outline, of a bibliography, or of a business letter. Keep this book nearby whenever you write. Develop the habit of looking up the answers to questions that arise concerning the use of standard English.