As always, David Crystal explains grammar and language in clear, accessible and intelligent ways. This book uses the analogy of his daughter Suzie’s acquisition of language to illustrate the various components of English grammar and explain how various myths and prescriptive teachings arose. The book includes an excellent appendix that provides ideas on how to teach English grammar using this framework. Another of Crystal’s books, Making a Point (about punctuation), includes content along these lines as well, and I love that he explains the concepts from an educator’s point of view. It’s helpful not only to teachers, but also to editors and anyone who has a reason to help people learn the fundamentals of grammar. ( )

This book very effectively demolishes the traditional approach to English grammar, then replaces it with something less precise, and more difficult to grasp. That's unavoidable, since Crystal's emphasis is on the evolution of the study of grammar., which has changed radically over the last 50 years. He defines grammar as "the study of the way we bring words together in order to make sense". He traces the evolution of the study of grammar from the Greeks and Romans through the medieval period, up to the effort to codify English grammar in the early modern era. And here, Crystal argues, is where the study of English grammar went off track. The grammarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries based their analysis of English grammar on the workings of Latin grammar, and the two are very, very different. The result was a rules-based, highly artificial system which pulled against much of the underlying tendency of the language. In the 1960's and 1970's, this became clear, and the formal study of English grammar went out the window. Now, Crystal shows, it is coming back, but in a far less rigid and regular form.

The book is far more down to earth, and readable, than this lightning tour would suggest. Crystal uses language acquisition in children (one child, to be precise, chatty little Suzie) to explore the structures of English grammar. He looks at the was grammar has been taught, and the wars between prescriptivists and descriptivists. He looks at how English functions in various contexts and various countries. It is all very interesting, at least to anyone who is interested in the way our language works. It does not leave the reader with a firm sense of where grammar stands at present, which is a bit of a disappointment to one who grew up in a rules-based grammatical world. But is does show the richness and subtlety of English grammar. ( )