If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the ...

A major clause can stand on its own, whereas a subordinate clause relies on another part of the sentence and cannot stand on its own. For instance, ‘Helicopters can fly.’ This is a major clause. It ...

A dependent clause cannot stand alone, though they often contain both a subject and a verb. Where independent clauses express complete thoughts, dependent clauses do not, and left on their own, ...

We are concluding our discussion on phrases, clauses and sentences today. In the last two classes, we compared the three, underlining how a sentence is usually a combination of clauses and phrases. We ...

Subordinating conjunctions are words that help show relationships between ideas. They join a main clause and a subordinate clause. Words like 'because', 'although', 'if' and 'until' are common ...

The new question-of-the-week is: How should we teach grammar to students? Our students need to learn grammar, but the real question is how to teach it in ways that don’t bore them out of their minds.