Language
How English works, how to use it clearly, and how to recognise what writers are doing when they use it well. Grammar is the machinery. Writing is the craft. Literature is the art that results when craft meets purpose.
Units
Three tiers per unit. Beginner for the core idea. Intermediate for the formal rule with exercises. Master for the linguistic theory underneath.
22.01.01— Nouns draft22.01.02— Verbs draft22.01.03— Sentences: subject and predicate draft22.01.04— Pronouns draft22.01.05— Adjectives draft22.01.06— Adverbs draft22.01.07— Prepositions draft22.01.08— Conjunctions draft22.01.09— Interjections draft22.01.10— Noun phrases and verb phrases draft22.01.11— Subject-verb agreement draft22.01.12— Verb tense: present, past, future draft22.01.13— Perfect and progressive aspects draft22.01.14— Active and passive voice draft22.01.15— Clauses: independent and dependent draft22.01.16— Compound and complex sentences draft22.01.17— Relative clauses draft22.01.18— Punctuation: end marks and commas draft22.01.19— Punctuation: semicolons, colons, dashes draft22.01.20— Apostrophes and quotation marks draft22.01.21— Common errors: fragments, run-ons, dangling modifiers draft22.01.22— Parallel structure draft22.01.23— Pronoun case and reference draft22.01.24— Capitalization conventions draft22.02.01— Writing a clear sentence draft22.02.02— Paragraph structure draft22.02.03— Transitions and flow draft22.02.04— Thesis statement draft22.02.05— Structuring an argument draft22.02.06— Using evidence draft22.02.07— Counterargument and rebuttal draft22.02.08— Introduction and conclusion draft22.02.09— Citation and attribution draft22.02.10— Revision and editing draft22.02.11— Style and voice draft22.03.01— Literal vs Figurative Language draft22.03.02— Metaphor and Simile draft22.03.03— Symbolism and Allegory draft22.03.04— Irony draft22.03.05— Foreshadowing and Suspense draft22.03.06— Point of View draft22.03.07— Tone and Mood draft22.03.08— Theme draft22.03.09— Motif and Repetition draft22.03.10— Unreliable Narration draft22.03.11— Satire and Parody draft22.03.12— Imagery and Sensory Detail draft22.03.13— Allusion draft22.03.14— Personification draft22.03.15— Hyperbole and Understatement draft
Reading guides
Not "here's what it means." Instead: things to notice, questions to ask, what critics have argued. The reader brings their own reading.
- Guide 1. Homer, The Odyssey — A man tries to go home. It takes him ten years. Everyone he meets is either trying to kill him, marry him, or both.
- Guide 2. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex — A king tries to escape a prophecy. Every step he takes to avoid it brings him closer. The question is not just why he fails -- it's whether failure was ever optional.
- Guide 3. Dante, Inferno — A poet walks through Hell and finds it organized, bureaucratic, and full of people he knew personally. Revenge fantasy, theological map, or both?
- Guide 4. Shakespeare, Hamlet — A prince is told to kill his uncle. He thinks about it for five acts. Whether that makes him wise, cowardly, or something else entirely depends on which critic you ask.
- Guide 5. Shakespeare, Macbeth — A man hears a prophecy and murders his way to the top. The prophecy didn't tell him to do that. Or did it?
- Guide 6. Austen, Pride and Prejudice — Two people dislike each other for three hundred pages. Then they don't. Whether this is a love story, a social critique, or an economic transaction is still being debated.
- Guide 7. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities — It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Whether it was either depends on whether you were an aristocrat or a starving peasant -- and which side of the English Channel you were on.
- Guide 8. Shelley, Frankenstein — A scientist builds a creature. The creature learns to speak, read, and feel. Then it kills everyone the scientist loves. Who is the monster? The question has never been settled.
- Guide 9. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — A boy and a runaway slave float down the Mississippi River. It's been called the Great American Novel and it's been banned from schools, sometimes for the same passage.
- Guide 10. George Orwell, 1984 — Big Brother is watching. The Thought Police are listening. History is being rewritten. Orwell wrote it as a warning about Stalinism. Readers since have applied it to everything from advertising to social media.
- Guide 11. George Orwell, Animal Farm — The animals overthrow the farmer. Then the pigs become the farmers. Orwell said it was about Stalin. The pattern it describes has outlasted Stalin by seven decades and counting.
- Guide 12. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird — A lawyer defends a Black man accused of raping a white woman in 1930s Alabama. His daughter narrates the story. Whether the novel is a critique of racism or a story about white heroism depends on who's reading it.
- Guide 13. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart — Okonkwo is a strong man in a strong village. Then the missionaries arrive. Achebe wrote it as an answer to Western novels about Africa. Whether it answers them or complicates them further is part of the novel's power.
- Guide 14. William Golding, Lord of the Flies — A group of English schoolboys are stranded on an island. They try to build a society. It goes badly. Whether this proves that humans are naturally violent, or that English boarding schools produce damaged children, is an open question.
- Guide 15. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 — In the future, firemen don't put out fires -- they start them. Their target is books. Bradbury said it was about television destroying interest in reading. Readers since have found their own fears reflected in it.
- Guide 16. Toni Morrison, Beloved — A formerly enslaved woman is haunted. The ghost in her house has a name, a history, and a claim on her that no one else can understand. Morrison's novel refuses to let the reader look away from what slavery actually did to people.
Three strands
Grammar (section 22.01) — parts of speech, sentence structure, agreement, punctuation, clauses. Every unit is testable: identify the noun, fix the comma splice, diagram the sentence.
Writing (section 22.02) — clear sentences, paragraph structure, thesis construction, evidence, counterargument, revision. Builds on grammar prerequisites.
Literature techniques (section 22.03) — metaphor, symbolism, irony, point of view, theme, unreliable narration. The toolkit for reading literature attentively. Builds on grammar and writing.