Welcome to The Best Pedagogical Grammar in the World: The KISS Grammar Site

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's (1841-1919) Irene Cahen  d'Anvers 1879

     Don't believe me? Show me a grammar text that enables students to apply it to the analysis of anything that they read or write. Every text that I have seen presents students with definitions of grammatical constructions, each followed by one or two exercises. A construction is then dropped and instruction goes to something different. The books never show students how these constructions work together to form meaningful sentences. At a grammar conference in the 1980s, a primary school teacher explained how she taught the parts of speech. Then a middle school teacher did the same thing, then a high school teacher, and then a college teacher.
     In 1982, I was asked to teach a grammar course for future teachers. I agreed on the condition that I could teach what I believe is what students need. In that course, students learned how to identify prepositional phrases in a student's paper. The assignment for the next class was to identify these phrases in another paper. Then we added constructions such that most students could identify main and subordinate clauses in a paper, and some students even mastered gerunds, gerundives, infinitives, and noun absolutes. Click here for an example of the KISS differences.
     This site includes free instructional materials, essays, and even statistical studies that help design instructional sequences.