English Grammar: Language as Human Behavior, Second Edition

This is a very good survey of English grammar. Its outstanding features are reader-friendliness and the interactive approach manifested in discussion exercises intertwined with the text and practice exercises after each chapter. The student is invited to be an active participant in the learning process. The book is transparently organized and very beautifully produced, with charts and other typographic devices enhancing the structure of the text.

In 2005-2006 I taught a grammar class both semesters at a university. The class was made up of English majors (and people from other disciplines) who wanted to improve their writing and pre-service ESL teachers who needed to know about the structure of English. Due to the high cost of this book I undertook a search to find if there was any other book out there I'd rather that my students have. I didn't find one. This book is the best combination of the prescriptive and descriptive grammar I wanted that I was able to find.

If you are a linguist and you are looking purely for descriptive grammar, you could definitely start with this book, but you might want to go on to The Grammar Book (by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman) or the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (by Biber, et al.)

If I were teaching a descriptive-grammar class at the undergraduate level, I might consider the Longman Student Grammar of Spoken and Written English.

One can see that to a certain extent this nice English textbook echoes Kolln's "Understanding English Grammar".

However, the key difference lies in the fact that unlike Kolln's, Barry's text does not use Reed-Kellogg diagrams to represent the structure of sentences.

One of the best features of "English Grammar" is Chapter 13 SENTENCE ANALYSIS. In this chapter, a method of describing the very complicated sentences that occur routinely even in common conversation is presented in terms of simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences. These kinds of complex sentences are grouped together and summarized in only one chapter, whereas in Kolln's text such concepts are scattered around.

I didn't read this book, but I'd like to read it first so that I can write how I think about it.