English fascinated me from childhood. It was my passion and quest to feel the veins and pulses of English Language – its grammar and usage, makings and breakings, forms and functions, moods and modes, tone and rhythm, morph and phone, style and diction, structures and figures, prosody and rhetories, language and literature.
Though arbitrary like all languages and grammars, English is the most lucid, placid and openminded of all languages, that has made it a world class language and lingua franca.
As a teacher of English for thirty-three years and principal for 16 years in KVS and NVS, a participant, resource person, associate director and director in many English Language Teaching courses of regional, national and international platforms, I thought I should put on record all my studies, feelings, findings and representations of grammar and usage, linguistic and literary aspects, phonetics and communication skills in the form of an ‘all-in-one’ book for the greater and broader benefits of all the students and teachers from high school to university levels across the globe. Thus, this book was born.
There have been conflicts between the traditional and modern school of English grammar, which can be easily sorted out by simple correlation and reconciliation, corrections and modifications time to time in the course of growth and evolution of language and grammar. In this book, my mission and vision has been to build up a balanced approach taking both the schools hand in hand.
This book, as a text book and a reference book too, has been deliberately devised with graded learning and doing materials for very effective benefit of the students and teachers from high school to university level. The students with English Elective and Honours in the graduation level and post graduate students with English Literature, Linguistics and Phonetics will be immensely benefitted by this book. The basic as well as the advanced aspects and concepts in different areas of grammar, usage, composition, linguistic and literary aspects, phonetics and communication skills have been discussed intensively and exhaustively with highly motivating and knowledge-enriching exercises of varied types. Apart from being beneficial to the students and teachers in the school, college and universities in India and abroad, this book will be of great help to the aspirants of different competitive examinations like UGC-NET, CAT, MBA, GRE, GMAT, AFCAT, SSB, CDS, SSC, CLAT, TOEFL, IELTS, Banking examinations, Civil Service Examinations, other UPSC examinations, State level Administrative examinations and all other competitive examinations.
Contents –
46. Transformation of Sentences
47. Ellipsis
48. Punctuation
49. Idioms or Idiomatic Phrases or Cliches
50. Common Homonyms Distinguished
51. Common Synonyms Distinguished
52. Error Analysis
53. Similar Sentences Distinguished
54. One Word Substitutions
55. Basic Concepts Underlying the Rules of Spelling – A Morphophonemic Study: Illustration 1 to 55
56. Common Words Often Misspelled
57. Prosody and Rhetorics
58. Verse Forms
59. Types of Traditional Poetry: A Bird’s Eye View
60. Figures of Speech
61. Critical Appreciation
62. Subtitling or Outlining and Note-making
63. Precis
64. Art of Composition
65. Advance or Higher Skills of Writing
66. Art of Letter and Paragraph Writing
67. Paragraphs, Essays, Letters and Applications
68. Great Sayings by Great People
69. Language and the English Language
70. The Making of English Language
71. The Making of English Literature
72. Branches or Disciplines of Linguistic Science
73. Phonetics Made Easy
74. Articulation of Speech Sounds
75. Phoneme, Allophone and Phonology
76. Syllable Patterns
77. Syllable and Stress
78. Juncture or Jointure (Connected Speech)
79. Intonation, Tonic Pitch or Pitch Contour
80. Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC Analysis) or Contrastive Stress Rising and Falling Tone
