Welcome to the “Free English Grammar and Correct Usage” Page for understanding English grammar and to assess your grammar skills.
You will need to have a very good understanding of English grammar for your placement test since grammar and sentence construction skills are assessed on the writing test.
We suggest that you try our free writing skills exercises below:
More Free English Grammar Resources
If you answered a lot of questions incorrectly on the placement test exercises above or if you could not understand the explanations provided, you may need more free help with English grammar and correct usage.
You should therefore study grammar to improve your English language level in general before you begin to study for your examination.
Free English Grammar and Correct Usage Exercises
Here are some very good online resources to help improve your grammar and writing skills.
Purdue University has an excellent grammar resources page.
This page has worksheets for many of the aspects of grammar covered on the placement test. It covers verb usage and tenses, articles (a, an, the), relative pronouns (who, whom, whose, which), and subject/verb agreement.
The University of Minnesota writing support page has links to many helpful English language resources.
Next have a look at the PDFs, which you can download. It will help you avoid run-on sentences, which are among the most common errors that students make in their writing.
Also look at the links on the left-hand side of the University of Minnesota page for style and punctuation.
The University of Richmond provides a helpful chart showing commonly-confused words.
There is a chart to help you avoid common grammar mistakes, like using the word “effect” when you should use the word “affect.”
In addition, when you click on each word in the commonly-confused word list, you will see an explanation with example sentences containing each word.
They even have a printer-friendly version of the list that you can keep for your reference.
Professor Brians at Washington State University has recently published a book on the most common errors in English.
When you click on the link above, you will be directed to a page where you can download the word list.
You may also want to have a look at the link to get the book on Kindle.