English Grammar Guide
English grammar is the backbone of clear, confident communication, whether you are writing an email, studying for an exam or simply expressing yourself.
Grammar is not a list of rules to memorise, it is a system that shows how words work together to build meaning.
Once you understand that system, sentences start to make sense from the inside out, and the rules you once had to look up become choices you make without thinking.
Every sentence in English draws on the same few building blocks. Words fall into categories that determine what they do, tenses place the action in time, and clauses combine those pieces into complete thoughts. Learning how the parts connect is far more useful than learning them one by one.
This guide covers every major topic with plain explanations, practical examples and links to deeper reading. Use the sections below to find what you need, or work through the guide from the start.
From textbook knowledge to real English conversation
Tenses show when an action happens and help us place events in time.
Present tenses describe actions happening now or connected to the present.
- Present Simple: A habit, fact, or general truth.
- Present Continuous: An action happening now.
- Present Perfect: An action with a result in the present.
- Present Perfect Continuous: An action that started in the past and is still continuing.
Past tenses describe actions before now.
- Past Simple: A completed action in the past.
- Past Continuous: An action in progress in the past.
- Past Perfect: An action completed before another past action.
- Past Perfect Continuous: An action that had been continuing before another past moment
Future tenses describe actions that will happen later.
- Future Simple: A future action or decision.
- Future Continuous: An action in progress at a future time.
- Future Perfect: An action completed before a future time.
- Future Perfect Continuous: An action that will continue up to a future moment.
The parts of speech are the categories that words fall into, and they define what each word does inside a sentence.
- Nouns: Name people, places, things and ideas, giving us the who or the what of a sentence.
- Pronouns: Stand in for nouns so that you can refer back to something without repeating it.
- Prepositions: Show how one part of a sentence relates to another in place, time or direction.
- Adjectives: Describe nouns by telling us their size, colour, number, quality or the opinion we hold of them.
- Adverbs: Modify verbs, adjectives and other adverbs, answering how, when, where and to what extent.
- Comparative and Superlative: Change the form of adjectives and adverbs so that you can compare two things or rank one above all others.
- Verbs: Express action, occurrence or a state of being, and no sentence can exist without one.
- Modal Verbs: Add meanings such as ability, obligation and possibility to a main verb.
- Do, Does and Did: Build questions, negatives and emphasis as auxiliaries, and also work as full verbs in their own right.
- Have and Have Got: Both express possession, but differ in form, register and in how questions and negatives are built.
- English Irregular Verbs: Do not form their past tense with ed, so their forms have to be learned as a set.
Vocabulary is about the words themselves: how they are built, how they connect to one another and how to choose the right one.
- Word Relationships: Cover synonyms, antonyms, homophones and the other links that let you pick the most precise word.
- Style & Usage: Decides which words suit a situation, from formal writing to everyday conversation.
- Word Structure: Explains how prefixes, suffixes and roots combine to build new words and change their meaning.
Grammar conventions are the small words and markers that hold a sentence together and make its meaning precise.
- Articles & Determiners: Sit in front of a noun and signal whether it is specific, general or already known.
- Quantifiers: State how much or how many of something there is, depending on whether the noun is countable.
- Saxon Genitive: Marks possession with an apostrophe and s, as in the teacher's book.
- Comparative and Superlative: Change the form of adjectives and adverbs so that you can compare two things or rank one above all others.
Sentences and clauses are about structure: how words group into clauses, and how clauses combine into complete sentences.
- Synonyms, Antonyms, Connotations: Words with similar meanings, opposite meanings, and the associations they carry beyond their literal sense.
- Conditional: Sets out what happens if something else is true, across the zero, first, second and third conditional forms.
- Writing Styles: Shape how you write for a purpose, from narrative and descriptive to persuasive and expository.
- Clauses: Groups of words with their own subject and verb, either standing alone or depending on a main clause.
- Sentence Construction: Combines clauses into simple, compound, complex and compound-complex sentences.
Voice and speech are about perspective: which part of the action you put first, and how you report what someone else said.
- Infinitives: The base form of a verb, used after modals, after certain verbs and to express purpose.
- Passive Voice: Moves the focus onto the action or its receiver rather than the person performing it.
- Reported Speech: Tells someone what was said without quoting it, which usually shifts the tense back a step.