English grammar is a plan or a blueprint of the English language. People who read and write English use this blueprint to construct words, phrases and sentences.
This plan helps at two levels:
for forming words; and
for building sentences.
Building a Sentence is Like Building a House.
When you construct a house, you buy all kinds of building material: bricks, cement, sand, iron rods, wood, etc.
If you just pile up one type of material over the other, you do not get a house. You need someone called an architect to build the house according to some plan in his or her head. Architects draw such plans on a special kind of paper. Such plans are called blueprints.
Poor people who cannot afford an architect become their own architects and use some common sense plan to build their simple, ordinary-looking houses. They may not have a professional architect, but they too need a plan, however simple or unsophisticated.
Grammarians Are Like Architects
English grammar is a kind of plan for English language. We have a name for the professional person who writes down the plan of a language. We call that person a grammarian. A grammarian studies the rules and structures of a language more deeply than other people.
Some people may consider grammarians too high for their taste and look upon them with displeasure. This is similar to many poor people looking upon architects.
Yet we know that architects are good people and many of them help improve the world for the poor through planning low-cost housing. Similarly, grammarians too are good people who try to make language easier to understand for ordinary people.
Everyone Uses Grammar Whether They Like It or Not
People use English for their day-to-day ordinary needs of speaking and writing. They may want to know how to take part in a conversation in English, or how to write a letter, or fill an application form. Such people too need the plan (grammar) of English, though not perhaps as deeply as someone like the grammarian.
They are not planless, i.e. grammarless in their use of the language. They use grammar whether they like it or not. So it helps to know the plan of the language. You will have greater control of the language.
How Does Grammar Work in Sentence Building?
Just as you don't pile one type of building material over the other, you don't place words together in any order you like.
If you just throw in words together you do not get a sentence.
Like this... east the the sun in rises You do not get a sentence.
If you arrange those same words like this... the sun rises in the east then, we get some meaning out of it.
We then give this arrangement some more polish like this... The sun rises in the east. We have capitalized the first letter and added a full-stop (period) at the end of this arranged group of words. We call this a sentence.
A plan, hiding behind this arrangement, helped us to put the words in the correct order, i.e. the order which brings meaning.
The Two Levels of English Grammar.
English grammar works at two levels: morphology and syntax.
Morphology - The Formation of Words
Words are like building material. Take cement. Many chemicals join together according to some chemical formula to become cement. Words are born out of word-parts (these parts have names such as stems, affixes, prefixes, suffixes, etc.).
This whole science of word-formation has the high-sounding name of morphology. Morphology is one of the two important parts of English grammar.
Syntax - The Construction of Sentences
Usually people tend to think of this part as grammar. Different words such as nouns, verbs, pronouns, and others, called parts of speech, come together to become sentences.
The plan that people follow to build sentences from words has also a high-sounding name - syntax. Syntax is the other important part of English grammar.
I Think, I Hear You Ask a Question
You ask me, "what about sentences making a paragraph?"
Good question.
Smaller sentences come together to form more complicated sentences (they are called by names such as Complex, Compound, Complex-Compound sentences). The study of this is also a part of syntax.
When we use sentences of all types to create paragraphs, we are busy with composition. Composition is a general name for anything a person creates out of parts. We do not consider it specifically to be a part of grammar.
And finally...
...a little bit of fun at the expense of those who spell "English grammar" in their own original way! If they get lost, you will be doing a meritorious act to show them the way to this site!
