English Grammar

How do people mark an essay? Is grammar more important or vocabulary? I have completed three grammars and my writing skill is still very weak. I always forget the grammar rules.

For here are the remarkable facts. Most of the prescriptive rules [false rules] of the language mavens make no sense on any level. They are bits of folklore that originated for screwball reasons several hundred years ago and have perpetuated themselves ever since. For as long as they have existed, speakers have flouted them, spawning identical plaints about the imminent decline of the language century after century.

All the best writers in English have been among the flagrant flouters. The rules conform neither to logic nor tradition, and if they were ever followed they would force writers into fuzzy, clumsy, wordy, ambiguous, incomprehensible prose, in which certain thoughts are not expressible at all. Indeed, most of the "ignorant errors" these rules are supposed to correct display an elegant logic and an acute sensitivity to the grammatical texture of the language, to which the mavens are oblivious.

The scandal of the language mavens began in the 18th Century. The London dialect had become an important world language, and scholars began to criticize it as they would any institution, in part to question the authority of the aristocracy. Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire. The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English.

These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces: the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore. Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don't split infinitives, don't end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these 18th Century fads.

http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1994_01_24_thenewrepublic.html

I have realized how weak my English is.

This is the finest work of scholarship on English grammar and usage I have ever seen, in thirty years of doing research on English grammar. One grouchy reviewer on this page gives it a one-star put-down and grumbles that it is unreliable, advocating a return to Fowler, or Strunk and White. Don't believe it. The stiff and constricting prescriptions of those older works are in fact often unfounded. The third edition of Fowler (prepared by Burchfield) is not an improvement, and actually gets grammatical points wrong (and I means things like giving examples that are not in fact examples of the point at issue). The Merriam-Webster book is on a different level of scholarship. The example collection is magnificent, the analysis is intelligent and accurate, and where it says something is now acceptable literate usage you can trust it. Of course, if you want silly advice, like "never end a sentence with a preposition" or "never split an infinitive", you won't find it: there are irrational prejudices in the English usage field, and this book lends them no support. But this is because it demands EVIDENCE and ARGUMENT concerning the points it treats; it is not content simply to pass on dogmas and myths from past centuries. I was particularly struck by the fantastic value of this book: Amazon brought it to my door for shipping included -- and this is a 990-page large-format hardback! BUY THIS BOOK. You can't afford not to if you have any serious interest in English grammar.