When I first got to college realizing that I was having a very difficult time with writing, I went to the grammar section in the school's library. After failing to work through a few of the more popular books on grammar that I tried, I discovered an small obscure grammar book. The way the book worked is to first explain a handful of grammar concepts and then have the reader parse several sentences before moving onto more complex concepts. It was so systematic and methodical.

I reviewed the book a couple years ago and out of curiosity searched for one of the concepts online. There were only a small handful of search results and I think the author made up the word, the book is obscure. One of the results linked to an article on the IBM website written by one of the Watson engineers. I wrote him an email because I would imagine their engineers were using much more complicated concepts in linguistic research that a layman like my self would ever understand.

We were interested in two very different things. He is interested in helping a machine understand semantic meaning through grammatical structure while I'm interested in helping people understand semantic meaning through grammatical structure. Sure we are both using the same grammar book to parse a sentence. But how we are doing it is completely different. He is writing a program to do it and I'm writing a program to hold a child's hand while the child does it.

A sentence is a pattern of patterns. For the same reason Mike Bostock's work in visualization helps people understand patterns whether it is about the road to the White House or the road to the Super Bowl based on team salaries, visualization helps students with pattern recognition in their own writing.

I'm curious about this book, what was it?

Doing Grammar by Max Morenberg [1]For me, isolating the concepts spared me a lot of confusion.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Grammar-Edition-Max-Morenberg/dp...

Thanks!