Think your a grammar nerd?
Did you pick up on the mistake we made in the previous sentence? If you did, bravo! We challenge you to put your smarts to the test by taking our impossible English test—and if you didn’t, we still invite you to try your darndest!
The questions will get harder as you go—will you ace the quiz or fail miserably? Only one way to find out—hit "Start Quiz" to begin!
Questions Overview
- fewer
- more
- less
- too few
- After “Barbie”
- After “call”
- After “you”
- No comma needed
- over
- under
- through
- against
- is waving
- have waved
- have been waving
- wove
- there
- their
- they’re
- thair
- fastest
- faster
- most fast
- fastiest
- will have ended
- ending
- ended
- end
- Stimuli
- Stimulis
- Stimuluses
- Stimmies
- Dont
- Your
- Hers
- Mine
- “The dog ate my candy canes and she smells like peppermint now.”
- “The dog that ate my candy canes and smells like peppermint.”
- “The dog smells like candy canes, which smell like peppermint.”
- “The candy canes ate my dog.”
- 2
- 3
- 1
- No errors
- Carefully
- Lovely
- Dastardly
- Squiggly
- Lullaby
- I
- Sang
- Monkey
- Advance
- According to
- Toward
- Until
- between
- among
- through
- up
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English Grammar 101
What is grammar?
Grammar refers to the structure of language. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to communicate our thoughts, ideas, and opinions as effectively! For instance, if you said, “While walking through the garden, crows cawed to one another,” it’s unclear who, exactly, is walking through the garden. Is it the crows? But if you modify this sentence a little—“While I walked through the garden, crows cawed to one another”—it’s suddenly obvious what’s happening. Grammar helps us communicate precisely and clearly.
Sure, you could argue that you can assume that the initial sentence doesn’t mean it’s the crows who are walking—but you don’t want to over-rely on assumptions. That’s how you get sentences like “Let’s eat Grandma” instead of “Let’s eat, Grandma” (with a vocative comma before “Grandma,” signifying the speaker is addressing her). Please, keep your grandmother safe: know your grammar.
That being said, the notion of “correct” English grammar is actually pretty fraught (as anyone who’s ever been shut down in an argument by a “grammar nazi” can probably attest). It’s important to remember that grammar is always changing and evolving, and that different groups of people follow different grammatical rules—and that as long as those rules are consistent and uphold a linguistic structure whereby people can communicate clearly and effectively, they’re still correct.
For instance, the habitual “be” is common in African American Vernacular English, but is often assumed to be grammatically incorrect by grammar purists. Yet the habitual “be” is used consistently within AAVE to mark habitual or extended actions: “Ray be working late” indicates that Ray regularly works late, rather than that he is working late in the moment. This is in contrast to standard English, in which “is” denotes a temporary state. The habitual “be” implies an ongoing or repeated state or action.
Grammar doesn’t just shift from culture to culture or location to location: it also changes over time, so words and rules we may once have viewed as “incorrect” are now accepted as standard English. For example, while we use the pronoun “you” to refer to a single person or multiple people, in Old English, “you” was a second-person plural pronoun—and only when it was the object of the sentence! Otherwise, you’d use “thou,” “thee,” or “ye,” depending on how many people you were referring to and whether they were the object or subject of the sentence.
How often do you hear “thou,” “thee,” or “ye” nowadays?
Want to learn more?
To read more about grammar and the English language, check out these sources:
Reader Success Stories
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