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Grammar On!

Grammar On! offers a welcoming space for you as a multilingual student to develop your reading, writing and critical thinking skills. It’s an opportunity to engage your multilingual abilities in enhancing your understanding of the genres and conventions of academic writing.

You will meet on Thursdays, in sessions from 11:30 – 12:30 p.m., where you practice reading and writing strategies, get expert advice on how to incorporate effective academic moves in your written work, learn alongside motivated peers, and exchange ideas and learn from each other. Our first session will be held on Thursday October 24th.

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Dunja Baus, York University Professor

In 2024-2025, Dunja Baus leads Grammar On!

Grammar On! is an inclusive, collaborative and interactive space. Our 2024-2025 specialist instructor Dunja Baus (dbaus@yorku.ca) uses a learning-through-doing experiential approach to promote an active and critical approach to key academic skills.

Grammar On! is open for drop-in! Join Grammar On! by using the Zoom link below.

For more information about the Grammar On! you can contact Writing Centre Coordinator James Robertson at jroberts@yorku.ca.

Join Grammar On!

Grammar On! Schedule

The focus of some sessions may be slightly modified depending on the audience. Some aspects of the topics will be recursively addressed as essential features of academic writing as relevant. Connections will be made as much as possible/appropriate (depending on the audience) to students’ disciplines, other languages, prior writing experience and knowledge, and interests.

We often think of academic writing conventions as limitations to our writing and of grammar as a series of scary rules about “what-not-to-do.” But academic writing conventions can serve as guidelines in producing an effective piece of writing, and grammar is an awesome tool you can use to write more effective sentences and increase your range of syntactical choices.   

Come join Dunja on Thursdays at 11:30am in the Writing Centre’s Grammar On! series of online workshops. The workshop is open to all students who want to learn to construct elegant and effective academic sentences that say what you want them to say and do what you want them to do. 

Join Grammar On!

If thinking about independent and dependent clauses gives you clausetrophobia, then come on out to The Writing Centre’s first Grammar On! Power-Hour on Zoom on Thursday October 24 at 11:30 for a fun, interactive, and engaging lesson on clauses! 

Then comma on out of the seasonal blues to learn about commas, commas, and commas, and how to use them expertly!  

Do you feel tense when you think about time? Then make time this week to come talk about the 13 ways of Looking at Time in English sentences! In this Thursday’s Grammar On!, you’ll not only learn how to time-travel in your academic essays, but you’ll also discover that the past and present are both “simple” and “perfect”

Let’s Get Active! (And, of course, Passive, too, but with a Purpose.)

Unsure about when to use Active Voice or Passive Voice in your academic essays? Come to this Thursday’s Grammar On! and learn how to use voice with purpose and confidence! 

Let’s connect and correlate! Come to this week’s Grammar On! to learn how the correlative conjunctions add focus and force to your sentences.  

Name that this! 

Which this?  

That this.   

Wait, whuuut? 

That this there. Name that this.   

But to which this are you referring?  

That one: name that this. 

This is going nowhere.  Exactly.

A lot of us are confused about when to use “that” and when to use “which”. “Which” might sound fancier in a sentence, but it’s not always your best grammatical choice. Come to this week’s Grammar On! and learn how – and when – to use “that” and “which” with purpose and pizzazz.

Are you in the habit of disguising perfectly good verbs in those bloated drag-your-sentence-to-a-slow-and-heavy-crawl nouns called nominalizations? Come to this week’s Grammar On! and learn how to quicken the pulse and the pace of your sentences. Come learn how to verb that noun!!  

Multilingual Specialist Dunja Baus speaks about Grammar On!

Space is limited in Grammar On!

For more information about the Grammar On! you can contact Writing Centre Coordinator James Robertson at jroberts@yorku.ca.