English Grammar and Style

Welcome to WRITE101x
WRITE101x aims to introduce you to key concepts and strategies related to grammar and style. Absorbing
and applying these in your writing will help you to confidently respond to the unprecedented and
accelerating demands for high levels of literacy that have arisen in the 21st century.

We’ll present materials that cover grammatical principles, word usage, writing style, sentence and
paragraph structure, and punctuation. We’ll introduce you to some marvellous resources that we have
annotated for your guidance. We’ll show you video clips of interviews conducted with distinguished
grammarians, challenge you with quizzes and writing activities that will give you strategies to help you to
build skills that will enhance the quality of your writing, and invite you to participate in discussions and
assess the work of your peers.

The Write101x team

Roslyn Petelin
Associate Professor Roslyn Petelin is the course director of WRITE101x. She established and teaches
in the award-winning postgraduate program in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at The University of
Queensland. She has also taught Writing and Speech Communication in the School of Communication at
the Queensland University of Technology and in the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University
(New York, USA). She is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Corporate Communication at the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University. She edited the Australian Journal of Communication from 1988–2013, is a past
President and Honorary Life Member of the Australian & New Zealand Communication Association, has
co-authored two books, The Professional Writing Guide: Writing Well and Knowing Why (Allen & Unwin,
with Marsha Durham) and Professional Communication: Principles and Applications (Pearson, with Peter
Putnis), and recently published How Writing Works: A Field Guide to Effective Writing (Allen & Unwin).

Course Presenters
Lectures in the course are presented by Roslyn Petelin, Amber Gwynne, Catherine Blake, Dakoda Barker,
and James Blake. The course also contains a number of interviews with experts in subjects related to
grammar and style.

About Write101x
8 Weekly Sessions 4 Hours Per Week
Each week is released across the Watching the videos each week will
globe on Monday morning Brisbane usually take you about 20 minutes,
time. Watch the videos, do the but will take longer if you do all the
exercises, take the quizzes, and join exercises and check out the extra
in the discussions when you have readings and videos in our course
time. resources.
Learning Outcomes
Upon successfully completing this course, students will:

1. Reliably identify the roles and relationships of words in a sentence.

2. Demonstrate mastery of grammatical concepts and syntactical strategies and apply this knowledge to
produce coherent, economical, and compelling writing.

3. Critique and edit their own and others’ writing.

Course Schedule
Navigation introduction and welcome from the team

WEEK 1 L1 What is grammar and why does it matter?

INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE L2 Writing standard English
L3 Writing at the word level: How words work

L1 Parts of speech and word classes

WEEK 2
L2 Structure and patterns of sentences, phrases, and clauses
INTRODUCTION TO SENTENCES
L3 Common sentence-level problems

L1 Finite and non-finite verbs: Linking verbs, auxiliary verbs,

WEEK 3 transitive and intransitive verbs, verb phrases, phrasal verbs,
verbal phrases, infinitives, participles, and gerunds
INTRODUCTION TO VERBS
L2 Tense, mood, and voice of verbs

WEEK 4 L1 Form and function of nouns: Noun strings and nominalisations

INTRODUCTION TO NOUNS AND PRONOUNS L2 Form and function of pronouns
*STYLE-GUIDE ENTRY 1 ASSIGNED L3 Problems with pronouns

WEEK 5 L1 Adjectives: Form, function, use, The ‘Royal Order of

INTRODUCTION TO ADJECTIVES AND DETERMINERS Adjectives’, and degrees of comparison
*STYLE-GUIDE ENTRY 1 DUE L2 Adjectival sequencing, punctuation, and determiners

L1 Adverbs: Form, function, degrees of comparison, placement

WEEK 6 of adverbs, intensifiers, and weasels
INTRODUCTION TO ADVERBS AND CONJUNCTIONS L2 Conjunctions: Coordinating and subordinating, conjunctive
adverbs

WEEK 7
L1 How prepositions function, problems with prepositions
INTRODUCTION TO PREPOSITIONS AND PARAGRAPHS
L2 Paragraphing: Paragraph development and cohesive ties
*STYLE-GUIDE ENTRY 2 ASSIGNED

WEEK 8
L1 The main punctuation marks and punctuation problems
INTRODUCTION TO PUNCTUATION
L2 Other punctuation marks
*STYLE-GUIDE ENTRY 2 DUE
 Course Videos
Each week will contain a number of short video lectures. These videos can
be watched at slow or fast speed, in full screen or high definition, and with
or without closed captioning. Additionally, downloadable transcripts and
PowerPoint slides are provided for each lecture.

If you’d like to download videos to watch later on your mobile device, share
with your friends, or present to your class, go right ahead! All of our content is
available for use under a Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike License.

Discussion Forums
Each week, we encourage you to engage with others in the class on the
discussion forums about issues, themes and arguments presented. Our
moderators will provide you with a starting point for those conversations by
posing questions related to the week’s content, but feel free to go beyond those
topics and dig deeper.

Some academic ground rules: don’t copy-paste from others (plagiarise),

be respectful of others’ views, help each other, engage with each other
meaningfully, and have fun.

Grading
This course has two compulsory writing assignments that are worth 20% of
the overall grade. The instructions, criteria, due dates, and grading rubric are
available in the left navigation bar throughout the course. There are also eight
end-of-week quizzes that are worth 80% of the overall grade. Students have
until the end of the course to submit these for grading. In addition, writing
activities and discussion topics are included throughout the course, but do not
count towards the overall grade.

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