Grammar Choices for Graduate and Professional Writers

Grammar Choices is a guide to the choices available to academic writers in English. Although there are certainly some rules governing acceptable and unacceptable grammar, there are far more choices to be made among grammatically acceptable forms that have different meanings. The ability to control these meanings will help students communicate more effectively and efficiently in graduate-level and professional academic writing.

Grammar Choices is a different kind of grammar book: It is written for graduate students, including MBA, master's, and doctoral candidates, as well as postdoctoral researchers and faculty. Additionally, it describes the language of advanced academic writing with more than 300 real examples from successful graduate students and from published texts, including corpora. Activities encourage students to investigate the language choices that are typical of their own academic disciplines or professional fields through structured reading and writing activities. Grammar Choices is cross-referenced with Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd edition (Swales & Feak, 2012).

Each of the eight units in Grammar Choices contains: an overview of the grammar topic; a preview test that allows students to assess their control of the target grammar and teachers to diagnose areas of difficulty; an authentic example of graduate-student writing showing the unit grammar in use; clear descriptions of essential grammar structures using the framework of functional grammar, cutting-edge research in applied linguistics, and corpus studies; vocabulary relevant to the grammar point is introduced--for example, common verbs in the passive voice, summary nouns used with this/these, and irregular plural nouns; authentic examples for every grammar point from corpora and published texts; exercises for every grammar point that help writers develop grammatical awareness and use, including completing sentences, writing, revising, paraphrasing, and editing; and a section inviting writers to investigate discipline-specific language use and apply it to an academic genre.