When most people think of grammar, they think of avoiding errors. But grammar includes much more than that, and is more important than that. Generally speaking, grammar can be divided into two areas -- usage and syntax (sentence structure). Usage includes "rules of etiquette" -- "Don't write ain't." "Don't use a double comparative (such as more better)." Most of these rules are in the negative imperative ("Don't"), and they make people, especially students, worry about and hate grammar. Syntax, on the other hand, concerns the basic  building blocks of sentences -- prepositional phrases, subjects and verbs, clauses. This distinction, unfortunately, is not understood even by many of the people who teach English grammar in our schools. But the distinction is vital.
     The KISS approach concerns syntax, and if you study it, you will be surprised at how few building blocks are needed to understand how any sentence in English is put together -- how it conveys (or fails to convey) intended meaning. Etiquette (usage) may be important, but meaning (syntax) is more so. Some students naturally develop an excellent command of syntax, especially if they do a lot of reading. But many students do not. They write short, weak sentences that are simply not capable of expressing the complex thoughts required both in college and in the workplace. And not only do they write poorly, but their reading skills are very weak as well. Such students suffer in college and in the workplace, and they will continue to do so because our schools never properly address the teaching of syntax.
     The closest our schools have ever come to doing a decent job of teaching syntax was when they taught sentence diagramming. Sentence diagrams show how the various words in a sentence meaningfully relate to each other. (And, as I will attempt to show below, it is a matter of the syntax affecting the meaning.) In our schools, however, diagramming generally failed for at least five reasons. First, the rules for which lines go where on the diagram are cumbersome. Second, diagramming a complicated sentence takes a lot of time, effort, and paper. Third, the sentences used in the classroom were almost all too simplistic. Fourth, teachers often did not understand how to diagram, and therefore only used "safe" sentences for which they had answer keys. Fifth, students were rarely told why they were learning to diagram.
     Although some schools continue to teach diagramming, most have abandoned it. Here is not the place to examine all of the things that have been tried in its place, but the most common is to teach students to identify specific constructions. For example, students will study and then do an exercise on subordinate clauses. The exercise usually contains from ten to twenty carefully selected (and thus overly simplistic) sentences. For years, teachers have been mystified by the fact that most students can do these exercises, but the exercises have no effect on the students' ability to read or write. Perhaps the mystery can be explained by an analogy. Suppose I were to teach you about computers. First, I'll teach you about disk drives. I'll show you, and teach you to identify, several types of drives. I'll even have you look inside computers and point to the drives (which is comparable to having students identify clauses in a sentence). Then we'll work on mother boards; then video cards, then modems, then audio cards. When we are finished, I'll give you all the parts you need -- plus some extras -- and ask you to put together some computers. Do you think you could do it?
     If you think you could, you might want to try it. I have been working with computers for almost two decades, but I still hate to have to go inside one. And I'll probably never try to put one together from scratch. I know all the parts, but the connections among them get very confusing. Which chip goes in which socket? Which cable plugs into what? It's the connections that cause the problem. And it's the connections that cause many students problems with sentence structure. Learning to identify parts is a first step, but unless one has had some practice with the connections -- in real computers, or in real sentences -- the ability to identify the parts is practically useless.
     The KISS approach teaches students to identify the parts and the connections in real sentences. The students' objective is to be able to explain how every word in every sentence is syntactically connected to a main subject / verb / complement pattern. To my knowledge, no approach to teaching grammar has ever done this before. The sentences in these editions of the KISS Grammar Game, for example, were written by a Professor of Biology and by a nursing student. Although they were aware that their writing would be used in a grammar game, neither writer was aware of how the game works, or how they might want to edit their writing for the game. They simply wrote as they normally would. The editions therefore present real sentences in real contexts, and the game deals with each and every sentence, in sequence.
     Because the game deals with real sentences in context, students can see themselves making progress toward their objective of understanding all of the connections in any sentence. They can literally measure their progress. The following chart is an example:
 

1. The women were doing the dishes. The men were playing cards
2. The women were doing the dishes while the men were playing cards.
3. The women were doing the dishes; the men were playing cards.
4. The women were doing the dishes because the men were playing cards.