In this course, the seven-plus hours of video lessons provide us with a close-up look at the words and word groups that constitute the English language. These lessons are accompanied by 202 exercises and the answers to those exercises.

In part 1 of this series of lessons, we study the eight parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. The parts of speech provide us a word-level approach to studying English grammar. Later, we will see how the concepts that apply at the level of the single word apply to larger word groups as well.

In part 2 we study sentence structure. Once we’ve established a firm understanding of subjects and verbs, we can build on that understanding by learning to write and identify simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

In part 3 we study the nine English phrases: noun, verb, prepositional, infinitive, gerund, participial, adjective, appositive, and absolute. Some of these phrases appear naturally in our writing; others can appear in our writing only after we’ve learned to create them.

In part 4 we study punctuation: end marks, commas, semicolons, colons, apostrophes, quotation marks, italics, parentheses, brackets, hyphens, dashes, and ellipses. With some punctuation marks, our goal is correctness; but with others, our goal is to use punctuation to add style and voice to our writing.