©Laura Spencer
I love using words. That love of words is one of the reasons that I became a writer.
But the way that you put words together is important. Grammar is sort of a dirty word for some creatives, and I totally understand that. However, if you’re going to break the rules in your writing, you first need to understand what the rules are. That’s where grammar comes in.
Using bad grammar because you don’t know what you’re doing just makes you look, well…bad.
With the goal of refreshing my own grammar skills, I downloaded the Grammar Pop app for my iPad several months ago. After all, I couldn’t think of anyone better to provide a grammar app than Grammar Girl. (If you’re not familiar with Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl web persona, you’ll want to check out her blog as she tackles tricky grammar questions.)
In this post, I’ll share my thoughts and impressions of the Grammar Pop app. If you use the app, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Note: I am not an affiliate for this product. I purchased the product and reviewed it simply because I was looking for a fun grammar game.
What You’ll Get
Remember that high school composition course you took on the parts of speech? Do terms like gerund, participle and preposition ring a bell?
If you’ve ever had to diagram sentences, you’ll relate to this app. If you haven’t, you’ll learn something new.
Basically, the app teaches you to recognize the parts of speech in fun, multi-level game. In case you’ve forgotten what those are, here’s a list:
- Adjective
- Adverb
- Article
- Conjunction
- Gerund
- Infinitive
- Noun
- Participle
- Preposition
- Pronoun
- Verb
Here are some more details:
- Choose between a timed game (more challenging) and an untimed game.
- Earn badges for each part of speech.
- Select one of three categories: easy, medium, and advanced.
- Move through the various levels in each category, for a total of 28 levels in the app.
- Progress through the categories and levels in order, but you can choose to replay a previous level.
- Listen to the sound track or turn it off (depending on your preference).
What You Won’t Get
Although the app does a very good job of helping you learn to identify the parts of speech, that’s the only part of grammar that this app tackles.
Hopefully Grammar Girl will provide us with more grammar apps in the future. Here are some ideas for the future that aren’t included in the current Grammar Pop:
- Punctuation app
- Spelling quiz
- Verb tenses
- Multi-player capabilities
Hopefully, there will be future versions of the game, or more grammar apps.
Who Can Use This?
Just about anyone who needs to work on their grammar skills will enjoy this fun app.
More specifically, I can see the following people as benefiting the most:
- Professional writers who have not recently taken an English composition course.
- Students who are currently taking an English compositions course.
- Those who are learning English as a second language.
Your Turn
Have you used this app? What other grammar apps do you like?
