Grammar, usage, and mechanics establish the ground rules of writing, circumscribing what you are free to do. Within their limits, you select various strategies and work out those strategies in terms of words, sentences, paragraphs. The ground rules, however, are relatively inflexible, broken at your peril. It is not always easy to draw the line between grammar and usage or between usage and style. Broadly, grammar is what you must do as a user of English; usage, what you should do as a writer of more or less formal (or informal) English; and style, what you elect to do to work out your strategies and realize your purposes.

Очень качественные уроки из серии Basic English Grammar. Видеоурок рассчитан на начальный уровень знаний.

1. Proper nouns not capitalized.

Incorrect: louisa adams, Wife of john quincy Adams, was the first (and only) foreignborn First Lady.

Correct: Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, was the first (and only) foreignborn first lady.

We use the present simple to describe things that are always true, or situations that exist now and, as far as we know, will go on indefinitely:

Because beginning a sentence.  

"Because I could not stop for Death-He kindly stopped for me". So begins one of Emily Dickinson's most well-known poems, and so falls another of the more arbitrary rules of usage, which states that you should not begin a sentence with because. As Dickinson's poem attests, there are occasions when because is perfectly appropriate as the opening word of a sentence. In fact, sentences beginning with because are quite common in written English.

We use can to say that someone has the ability or opportunity to do something. The negative of can is cannot (contraction: can't).

There are a large number of adjectives ending in '-ing'. Most of them are related in form to the present participles of verbs. In this grammar they are called '-ing' adjectives.

• He was an amiable, amusing fellow.
• He had been up all night attending a dying man.

Pull someone's leg

(fool someone)

Punctuation is the art of dividing written language by points, in order that the meaning may be readily understood.

        What are the characters used in Punctuation?

Jump down someone's throat

(become angry with someone)