So I finally started reading English Grammar & Usage. In standard Adlerian fashion, I gave it a good inspectional reading first. The book is divided into two parts according to a distinction made between descriptive grammar and prescriptive usage as the title suggests.

The first part is around a third of the book and follows a traditional approach analyzing language into fundamental components that yield communication once given proper form. It builds from words to phrases to sentences then treats of verbs in depth. The second part fills the remaining two-thirds. Over a third of the second part is dedicated to all things punctuation with the rest treating various other word- and sentence-level issues.

I stopped this first session after reading the introduction to the first chapter on parts of speech. I frequently find myself forgetting these basic concepts having never fully committed them to memory, so this study is much needed. The book distinguishes eight parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections—the last of which is irrelevant to grammatical study.

To finally remember the seven grammatical parts of speech, I grouped them into sets of 3 and 4, and made connections between the two groupings. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives form a basic whole that should be easy to remember having been inculcated from a young age. The latter group—adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions—are harder to remember. I break it down into two sets of two. First, adverbs and pronouns are (dissimilarly) related to nouns and verbs in reverse order, and second, conjunctions and prepositions relate stuff.

I also find it helps if you think about the different ways words have to be used to convey all possible kinds of information:

• Interjections cover the expression of emotion.
• Nouns cover substantives or things that can exist.
• Verbs cover action and passion (to use Aristotelian categories) and are required to convey any kind of change.
• Adjectives cover quality, quantity, etc. (to use Aristotelian categories again) and are required to express various modes a noun can exist in.
• Adverbs cover many modifications not covered by adjectives that I have yet to fully learn and appreciate.
• Pronouns are words you expect to see frequently so they don’t feel as jarring as seeing a proper name referenced every single time. They (hey, that’s a pronoun!) also probably help facilitate more rapid comprehension at the cost of being less explicit and possibly conveying the wrong meaning.
• Conjunctions establish logical relationships between stuff.
• Prepositions cover physical or analogous relationships between stuff.

Anyway, that’s everything for the first day. Next I’ll go through the specifics for a few of the parts.