Continuing the best-selling "Help Your Kids..." series, this simple, visual guide helps parents and their children to understand and use the English language, including grammar, punctuation, spelling, and communication skills.

Carol Vorderman combines pictures, diagrams, and easy-to-follow instructions and examples to cover all the important areas, so you can approach even the most complex English concepts with confidence. Whether you are a kid who wants to structure and write the perfect essay, a parent confused by the words "disinterested" and "uninterested", or a teacher who needs a refresher course in using commas, Help Your Kids With English can help. It also includes colour-coded cross-references on every spread to show links between language ideas, as well as a comprehensive glossary of key terms at the back of the book.

This clear and accessible book aims to reduce the stress of studying English and helps your child with their classroom projects and homework. It is the perfect guide for every frustrated parent and desperate child who wants to understand English and put what they've learnt into practise.

This book is part of a book series called Help Your Kids With .

There are 256 pages in this book. This is a reference book. This book was published 2013 by Dorling Kindersley Ltd .

Carol Vorderman is the best-selling author of a number of non-fiction titles. She has also been the numbers face of Countdown for over two decades and a popular TV-presenting personality. She was awarded an MBE in 2000.

This book has the following chapters:

• 1: Foreword
• 2: Why learn the rules?
• 3: Spoken and written language
• 4: English around the world
• 5: Grammar
• • • 1: The purpose of grammar
  • 2: Parts of speech
  • 3: Nouns
  • 4: Plurals
  • 5: Adjectives
  • 6: Comparatives and superlatives
  • 7: Articles
  • 8: Determiners
  • 9: Pronouns
  • 10: Number and gender
  • 11: Verbs
  • 12: Adverbs
  • 13: Simple tenses
  • 14: Perfect and continuous tenses
  • 15: Participles
  • 16: Auxiliary verbs
  • 17: Irregular verbs
  • 18: Verb agreement
  • 19: Voices and moods
  • 20: Phrasal verbs
  • 21: Conjunctions
  • 22: Prepositions
  • 23: Interjections
  • 24: Phrases
  • 25: Clauses
  • 26: Sentences
  • 27: Compound sentences
  • 28: Complex sentences
  • 29: Using clauses correctly
  • 30: Managing modifiers
  • 31: Commonly misused words
  • 32: Negatives
  • 33: Relative clauses
  • 34: Idioms, analogies and figures of speech
  • 35: Colloquialisms and slang
  • 36: Direct and indirect speech
• 6: Punctuation
• • 1: What is punctuation?
  • 2: Full stops and ellipses
  • 3: Commas
  • 4: Other uses of commas
  • 5: Semi-colons
  • 6: Colons
  • 7: Apostrophes
  • 8: Hyphens
  • 9: Inverted commas
  • 10: Question marks
  • 11: Exclamation marks
  • 12: Brackets and dashes
  • 13: Bullet points
  • 14: Numbers, dates and time
  • 15: Other punctuation
  • 16: Italics
• 7: Spelling
• • 1: Why learn to spell?
  • 2: Alphabetical order
  • 3: Vowel sounds
  • 4: Consonant sounds
  • 5: Syllables
  • 6: Morphemes
  • 7: Understanding English irregularities
  • 8: Roots
  • 9: Prefixes and suffixes
  • 10: Hard and soft letter sounds
  • 11: Words ending in -e or -y
  • 12: Words ending in -tion, -sion or -ssion
  • 13: Words ending in -able or -ible
  • 14: Words ending in -le, -el, -al or -ol
  • 15: Single and double consonant words
  • 16: The "i before e except after c" rule
  • 17: Capital letters
  • 18: Silent letters
  • 19: Compound words
  • 20: Irregular word spellings
  • 21: Homonyms, homophones and homographs
  • 22: Confusing words
  • 23: Other confusing words
  • 24: Abbreviations
  • 25: British and American spellings
  • 26: More British and American spellings
• 8: Communication skills
• • 1: Effective communication
  • 2: Picking the right words
  • 3: Making sentences interesting
  • 4: Planning and research
  • 5: Paragraphing
  • 6: Genre, purpose and audience
  • 7: Reading and commenting on texts
  • 8: Layout and presentational features
  • 9: Writing to inform
  • 10: Newspaper articles
  • 11: Letters and e-mails
  • 12: Writing to influence
  • 13: Writing to explain or advise
  • 14: Writing to analyse or review
  • 15: Writing to describe
  • 16: Writing from personal experience
  • 17: Writing a narrative
  • 18: Writing for the Web
  • 19: Writing a script
  • 20: Re-creations
  • 21: Checking and editing
  • 22: The spoken word
  • 23: Debates and role plays
  • 24: Writing a speech
  • 25: Presentation skills
• 8: Reference
• • 1: Reference - Grammar
  • 2: Reference - Punctuation
  • 3: Reference - Spelling
  • 4: Reference - Communication skills
  • 5: Glossary
  • 6: Index
  • 7: Acknowledgements