Every speaker of English, even a child, commands a grammatical system of tremendous complexity. Take the sentence “A bear is occupying a phone booth while a tourist impatiently waits in line.” In theory, there are nineteen billion different ways to state the idea in that sentence.1 (Another is “A tourist fumes while he waits for a bear to finish yakking on a pay phone.”) How do we understand this unique sentence? For we do understand it, though we have never heard it before — not in those same words, in that same order.

To begin with, we recognize familiar words and their meanings. Just as significantly, we recognize grammatical structures. We know that the sentence contains a familiar pattern of syntax, or word order, that helps it make sense to us. Ordinarily we aren’t even conscious of such an order, but to notice it, all we need to do is rearrange the words of our sentence:

Phone a impatiently line in waits tourist bear a occupying is a booth while.

The result is nonsense: it defies English grammar. The would-be sentence doesn’t follow familiar patterns or meet our expectations of order.

Hundreds of times a day, with wonderful efficiency, we perform tasks of understanding and constructing complex sentences. Isn’t it possible to write well without contemplating grammar at all? Yes. If your innate sense of grammar is reliable, you can write clearly and logically and forcefully without knowing a predicate nominative from a handsaw. Most successful writers, though, have practiced for many years to gain this sense. When you doubt a word or a construction, a handbook can clear up your confusion and restore your confidence — just as a dictionary can help your spelling.

The grammatical conventions in this handbook are not mechanical rules but accepted ways in which skilled writers put words together to convey meaning clearly. The college writer can learn by following their example, just as an athlete, artist, or mechanic can learn by watching professionals.