40+ Tips to Improve Your Grammar and Punctuation

After all these years you finally have the courage and opportunity to write the email announcing that you and you alone have single handedly saved the company from utter disaster. You’re excited, you type it, you spell check it, and you hit send.

Everything is great except that your gold star memo has dangling modifiers, double negatives and run-on sentences colliding with each other.

Now I am no grammar whiz but I know a good resource when I see it. Purdue University maintains an online writing lab?and I spent some time digging through it. Originally the goal was to grab some good tips that would help me out at work and on this site, but there is simply too much not to share.

Learn and enjoy!

Nouns

• Count and Noncount Nouns: Basic Rules
• Count and Noncount Nouns (with Plurals, Articles, and Quantity Words)
• Count and Noncount Nouns (with Articles and Adjectives)

Adjectives and adverbs

• The Difference between Adjectives and Adverbs
• Avoiding Common Errors
• Adjectives with Countable and Uncountable Nouns
• Adjective or Adverb?

Prepositions

• Prepositions for Time, Place, and Introducing Objects
• Prepositions of Direction: To, On (to), In (to)
• Prepositions of Location: At, In, On
• Prepositions of Spatial Relationship

Pronouns

• Using Pronouns Clearly
• Pronoun Case
• Reflexive Pronouns

Relative Pronouns

• Introduction and General Usage in Defining Clauses
• Relative Pronouns in Non-defining Clauses
• Defining vs. Non-Defining and ESL Tips

Verb Tenses

• Sequence of Tenses
• Passive Verb Tenses
• Active Verb Tenses
• Verb Tense Consistency
• Verbs with Helpers

Irregular Verbs

• Irregular Verbs: Overview and List
• Commonly Confused Verbs

Others

• Spelling: Common Words that Sound Alike
• Numbers: Writing Numbers
• Appositives
• Articles: A versus An
• Articles: Using Articles
• Making Subjects and Verbs Agree