3 Effective Ways to Improve Your English Grammar Skills
Then, do not worry anymore! In this article, I will tell you 3 ways which helped me improve my grammar skills.
There are very effective ways in which you can enhance your grammar skills and improve the quality of your write-ups.
Let’s get started.
1. Try Out an Online Course
The first and easiest way to improve your English grammar skills is to take an online course. There are plenty of such courses that you can find on the internet. You can learn grammar for free from YouTube. Places like Udemy can be especially useful in this regard.
We mention Udemy here because you can find courses by skilled and learned individuals and not some two-bit 10-minute videos. Another good thing about this platform is that the courses often go on sale, and they are not very expensive to buy.
Okay, enough about Udemy. Let’s talk about how and why online courses can be a good way to improve your grammar.
The good thing about courses is that since they are provided by humans, there are a lot of spontaneous and useful explanations that you can get, something which is not that easy to come by in bleak written material.
Similarly, another good thing about courses is that they don’t require a lot of effort on your part, except watching, listening, and occasionally making notes, etc. On the other hand, when you have to read or do exercises (in order to improve grammar), there is a lot more that you have to do.
2. Read Expertly-Written Content
Reading is an effective way of not only improving grammar skills but also your overall writing style, sentence formation, and tone.
However, in order to reap the benefits of reading, you have to make sure that you stick to reading the content written by experts and professionals. By reading properly-written content, you will be able to understand different types of grammar rules and regulations. Some of the stuff that you can learn this way includes the following:
- Proper use of commas, colons, and semi-colons
- Proper use of either, or, neither, and nor
- Properly placed modifiers
Let’s actually grab a passage from a reliable, high-quality online source to show you what we mean:
That looks like a big jumble of arrows but take a look at where they are pointing. In the first sentence, you can see how the words “red-hot” have a hyphen in between. Omitting this type of hyphen is a mistake a lot of rookies can make.
Moving on, you can see how the comma is placed before the word “with”. This is a somewhat sensitive placement that a lot of newbies are wont to ignore. The same goes for the other grammatical elements that we’ve pointed out in the image.
By reading and going through this type of content, you will automatically learn to apply these types of delicate and subtle grammatical rules in your own write-ups.
But, then again, we have to reiterate ensuring the reliability and authenticity of the source that you use. You don’t want to end up learning incorrect and inaccurate stuff from an amateurish author.
3. Use an Online Tool
Using an online grammar and punctuation checker is also a good way to build your grammar skills. These tools can be a lot more engaging and interactive than doing some simple reading. They can also be a tad less boring than taking an online course.
Here is how this whole thing works.
First of all, you have to prepare a draft by writing it yourself…from top to bottom. During the course of writing the draft, don’t take any sort of help from anyone. This is to ensure that you get an idea about all your errors and mistakes later on.
Then, once you are done writing your draft, you have to enter it into a grammar checker of your choice. We personally recommend using the one by Prepostseo or Grammarly.
After you enter your content into the tool, the latter will point out the errors and mistakes in it. Both of the tools that we’ve mentioned above work fairly accurately, and they also provide the correct suggestions when you click on the highlighted errors. Here, you can see both of their screenshots below:
This picture is taken from Grammarly |
This picture is taken from Prepostseo’s Grammar Checker |
Okay, so those are the steps that you have to follow, fine. But how does this all help in improving your grammar skills?
Basically, once you enter your content into the tool and all the errors get pointed out, you will simultaneously find out their correct suggestions as well…provided that the tool supports this feature (as demonstrated above).
This will help you understand the errors that you make in your content, which will allow you to learn how to avoid/remove them in the future.
Conclusion
Although there are a lot of other ways in which you can improve your grammar skills, the methods mentioned above are a good place to get started.
To begin with, you can start reading content published by reliable and authoritative online sources. Then, you can move on to using online tools for getting help in the learning process. Last but not least, you can take an online course to get expert tips and perspectives on grammatical rules and regulations, as well as their correct applications in actual content creation.