A solid understanding of English grammar will help you immensely on the GRE—and in your daily life as well. 🙂 Below are my top 5 favorite online grammar resources, in no particular order:
1. The Purdue Owl– This is a great, academic resource on grammar topics such as articles, subject-verb agreement and prepositions. Very useful for writing AWA essays!
2. Grammar Girl– Grammar Girl offers fun and witty tips on interesting topics and common misconceptions about English grammar. For those of you who find grammar boring, this site might just change your mind!
3. University of Illinois’ Center for Writing Studies’ Grammar Handbook– The Grammar Handbook’s section on common usage problems is particularly useful for GRE studies- again, very helpful for AWA.
4. George Washington University’s ESL Study Hall Grammar– For those of you who have the added challenge of learning English as a second language, this meta-site provides several online resources for non-native English speakers, including links to grammar games and quizzes.
5. The Oatmeal.com, Grammar Comics- These comics make common grammar mistakes surprisingly…funny!
Hello Rychell, how much importent the ildioms on the eve of written and spoken english?.
Hi Anik,
Idioms can be a critical way to separate good from natural English at the high levels, and it can definitely make navigating standardized tests quite a bit easier. It is not ideal to start with idioms, though, before other grammar concepts are very comfortable.
I hope that makes sense! 🙂
THANK YOU FOR YOUR LINKS AS I HAVE TO GAIN A LARGE GROWTH IN GRAMMAR I NEED TO IMPROVE MY GRAMMAR WITH THESE LINKS
Your post is such a helpful one that I saved it not only for just GRE preparation,Its a must like thing for every type of writing a must to have reference links.Thanks for the post:)
Thank you for the links. I liked purdue. It helped me not only write essay but also understand passage.
It recommends that we do not use idiom in academic writting as pull someome’s leg. I am confused between idiom and figurtative or methaphoric language. I feel i will not be able to distinguish them during the exam. There was a book called idioms of toefl so i thought idioms are part of academic writting.
Hi Heba,
Great question! Idioms are usually much less formal than metaphorical language, and this is why idioms are not a part of academic writing. For the purposes of the GRE, it’s not incredibly important to be able to say “this is an idiom” or “this is a metaphor.” What’s most important is that you can recognize that “pull someone’s leg” is much too informal to be included in your essays 🙂
Hope this helps!
Best,
Rachel