Reddit reviews A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

Perhaps this might be of some use to you.

Here, you need this.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language is essentially the gold standard here, but it is pretty overwhelming.

Instead, the same authors have a much smaller and more manageable guide, A Student's Introduction to English Grammar, which I highly recommend. It's geared toward beginners and covers pretty much everything your average English speaker needs to know.

Here is a book I saw mentioned on a linguistics blog that seems to be a rigorous and very up to date college level grammar book:

A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

I haven't read it myself though.

The text I used in high school, which I thought was fine though unexciting, was Warriner's Grammar. There are several editions listed on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=warriner+grammar

I think the one I used was the 'Third Course'. A user review for the 'Complete Course' mentions that Stephen King had used this book when he was in school.

I learned traditional grammar when I learned Latin and Ancient Greek. As others
have said, learning a foreign language (especially a dead one) is a great way
to bulk up on grammatical knowledge in general... at least as long as the
foreign language is sufficiently similar to English. (For example, I'm not sure
if learning Mandarin would help your knowledge of English as much as learning,
say, German or Latin would, but maybe.)

That being said, if you want to learn standard, traditional, but up-to-date,
descriptive English grammar, I suggest Huddleston and Pullum's A Student's
Introduction to English
Grammar.
It's written by two highly respected and prolific linguists/grammarians. It's
based on their much more comprehensive tome The Cambridge Grammar of the
English
Language.

Start with Huddleston and Pullum's A Student's Introduction to English Grammar. If you get through that, you can graduate to the authors' Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.

> Compared to some other languages, English is already virtually devoid of grammar.

Completely and laughably wrong. Read this. Or for a quicker read, try this. Hell, just read some posts from LanguageLog.

> It's not the occasional typo I mind per se, but the cultural propagation of progressively devolved grammar, gradually reducing the language to a hybrid of hillbilly, valley girl, inner-city slang and various grunts.

Your hysteria is based on superstition and moronic suppositions. Non-standard and non-prestige varieties of language have existed for the entirety of recorded history alongside standard varieties. Sometimes they even make the leap to being standard languages. Ever heard of the Romance languages?

Do some research before you post next time!

Considering that you apparently already have some fluency, and assuming: British English, and that you are "merely" trying to incrementally improve; the following may be of use:

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Dummies-Geraldine-Woods/dp/0470546646
http://www.amazon.com.au/Learning-Grammar-Punctuation-Collins-English-ebook/dp/B005IH026C
http://www.amazon.com/A-Students-Introduction-English-Grammar/dp/0521612888
http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language-General/dp/0582517346

The informal style (it's me; that's him) is used much, much more often than the formal style (it is I; that is he), so you'll be safer sticking to that.

I'm not making this stuff up, by the way, I'm getting it from A Student's Guide to English Grammar by linguists Huddleston and Pullum.

This is good:

http://www.amazon.com/A-Students-Introduction-English-Grammar/dp/0521612888