LitPick Review
The Dragon Grammar Book by Diane Mae Robinson is a clearly written, informative book of grammar for anyone ages 12 and up. It begins with an explanation of the author’s purpose for this project and a list of important definitions that should help readers understand the grammar and punctuation rules that are well-organized into ten chapters.
To keep the book from feeling too much like a formal grammar book, each chapter begins with happy, light-hearted drawings of the characters from The Pen Pieyu Adventures series written by the same author. When they are compared with each other, the characters in the pictures seem to tell a fun story of their own about how grammar and punctuation might seem frightening at first but can be studied and learned. With an easy to understand book like this one, anyone can forget about it being a boring subject, and they can get excited about finally understanding how grammar and punctuation rules work.
Opinion:
The Dragon Grammar Book is a handy book to have around!
In this book, the rules are explained very well, and they have simple, sometimes silly, sample sentences about a kingdom with dragons in it. Most of the sentences show readers how to set up grammar and punctuation correctly, but in a few of the sections, sentences are labeled with (Wrong). This helps readers see common mistakes that anyone can make. The “Test Your Knowledge” sections and two tests also give readers opportunities to check how much they learned from the book. Much of each test comes from the sample sentences, so readers can review explanations in the chapters again if they can’t quite remember how to set up the sentences. The book ends with a few character sketches and positive feedback from others about the author’s Pen Pieyu series, so if readers enjoyed the theme in this book, they might decide to read those books too.
Grammar is usually hard to understand, but Ms. Robinson has made a difficult subject easy and interesting to learn. She explains why correct sentences are set up exactly the way they are, how some of the sentences are written incorrectly, and what to do to fix the mistake. When I first started studying grammar, I didn’t like it because many of the rules were complicated and didn’t make sense to me. This book has cleared up most of my confusion and has helped me see the purpose of learning to follow grammar and punctuation rules properly. I think reading this book will even help me be a better writer because it has helped me understand more about the parts of speech and how they work together with punctuation. Now I can set up my own sentences correctly more often and make sure they express the exact meaning that I want.
