Pocket Grammar

There is nothing much to learning Grammar or Usage. It isn't (is not) complicated or should take years of doing exercises to catch on. There is something called a sentence. It's (it is)  a statement that tells you someone or something did a deed. The first part is a he, she or it and the second part is what they did. That's ( that is ) a sentence. Never begin one with her or him or them, please. The first word needs a capital letter so make it one. The end will have some kind of punctuation such as a period ( a dot), a question mark ( you know what that is) or perhaps an exclamation mark (zzzit with a dot at the bottom). The latter is when you are shouting, cheering or laughing out loud. Now let's (let us)  take a look at the little marks that go here and there as you write your sentences. A period is a stop sign. It means that's ( that is) the end of that bit. The comma is a kind of taking-a-breath. It's (it is) a little whew and then you can go on. A sort of tiny gasp. When you want to put down a train of other words for clarity you need the comma to keep them from running smack into one  another. The question mark and exclamation mark have been mentioned before. Take a look back.  Then it gets a bit more complicated. There is something called a colon which is one period above another. It means, hey there's (there is)  more to it and let's (let us) add on more words for clarity. Then you have a rather weird thing named a semi-colon. It looks like the colon except that the bottom dot is now a comma. Remember that one? A semi-colon means, well, I should be a period but since the next part is sort of related to the first part I'll just add this bit to connect it to the first part. Then we get into the tricky little guy, the apostrophe. It's ( it is)  a kind of loose thread left over when you kick up and out, a whole word to do it but be cute about what you say. I'll (I will) is really I will. It's is really it is. (By now you may have noticed the broad hints every time I used an apostrophe.) And so on. There is nothing complicated about this use of the apostrophe. But there is another side to the apostrophe, and it happens when you want to show that something belongs to something else. If gramma has a cane, it is gramma's cane. Like that. You throw in the apostrophe to show what  you mean and if you want to get fancy, it's called the possessive. For argument's sake. The complicated bit  is it's and its. But it isn't ( is not) complicated at all. The rule simply applies. It's is it is and the term, its, is possessive. People get these two mixed up, understandably. They fall under the exception category and there aren't a whole lot of those fortunately. Just memorize them. The rest of grammar is saying what you want to express in a sentence such as where something happened, how it happened, who or what it happened to and perhaps why it happened. Newspaper folk call this the W factor: who, what , where, when and why. How comes into it, but that is often covered in the why of it all. So there you go, spell check, blue grammar hints aside. Just write your thoughts out and stop worrying about grammar. Write what you think and love doing it. Well, okay, grammarians, I did ignore quotation marks, but let's not overly complicate lesson number one.