Book excerpt: The new edition of this innovative text employs insights from contemporary linguistic theories but builds them into a practical and coherent system that stays firmly rooted within traditional models. Its down-to-earth explanations about how language works are illustrated at every step with diagrams and other visual models. The examples and exercises consist of provocative and intelligent sentences, not desiccated grammar-book examples. Each chapter includes a sentence-analysis exercise with fifty problems. Answers are provided for ten sentences per chapter. A new chapter on how grammar functions in literature and how it is used to improve writing extends the applications of Doing Grammar in this second edition, which also includes new introductory chapter outlines and thoroughly revised chapter summaries. The new edition was class tested for over a year. Every page has been re-thought and redefined to make grammatical analysis clear, understandable, useful, and interesting. It will be an invaluable guide for students in introductory and advanced grammar and composition courses and for all readers seeking to discover how language works.