Rules of English Grammar

The rules of English grammar can be confusing, and many students have difficulty learning the more arcane and complex aspects of them. For example, the subjunctive mood and the conditional tense are especially challenging for many because they use unusual forms of verbs, such as the plural forms of “to be” with singular subjects as in the following sentence: “If I were to be killed, you would stand to gain.” In this case, the conditional tense necessitates the use of a plural looking “were” to indicate that this is a hypothetical situation that is contrary to fact. Such seemingly minor rules of English grammar mark out the expert in all things grammatical from he who dabbles in the art.

The rules of English grammar are primarily derived from centuries of common usage, but some of the rules were purposely created by British scholars who wanted the language to be closer to Latin in the hope that Latinate grammar would make the language seem nobler. As a result, they began to say that an infinitive should never be split because in Latin the infinitive was a single word while in English the infinitive was two words, such as “to go.” Putting a word between these parts of the infinitive, such as “to boldly go” made for bad Latin, and the scholars thought it would make for bad English too.

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