Grammar and Style Choices for College Writers

This textbook provides a practical guide to grammar and style choices for college writers, giving students a basic vocabulary for thinking and talking about language use and enabling them to make purposeful choices in their writing.

Each section includes a short overview of a grammatical topic accompanied by exercises for raising the students’ awareness of and skills in using specific grammatical structures. It focuses on the practical and rhetorical functions of grammatical structures as they are used in expository and analytic writing, rather than on de-contextualized grammatical rules. Students will develop a repertoire of grammatical choices and understand the strategic reasons for making these choices in their writing for various audiences. It particularly attends to the structures that present the most difficulty for college students from multilingual communities and communities where a non-standard dialect of English is used on a daily basis.

This textbook can be used as a core textbook for grammar course as well as a supplementary text for composition courses. It is also suitable for courses tailored to multilingual, advanced non-native, or non-standard speakers of English.

Olga Griswold is a professor of linguistics and TESOL at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona.

Jennie L. Watson is an instructor of composition at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and Norco College, California.