Students of English who limit their study of grammar to what they find in grammar books are like naturalists who limit their study of nature to an encyclopaedia. Once you leave the safe confines of the grammar books, you begin to learn all kinds of interesting things about the way English is used. It isn't easy; in fact, it's a jungle out there.

Grammar books tend to make things fairly simple and there is some value in that. Nevertheless, for the serious student of English, it's worthwhile also to broaden your horizons and explore the jungle out in the real world. The Internet is an excellent place to begin experiencing English as it occurs in its natural surroundings--not only are there millions of English texts readily available, but also most of them can be electronically searched for those elusive yet fascinating English grammar structures.

Mrs.Grammar.com activities here are suggestions for "collecting" EXAMPLES of specific words as they are used in documents accessible to anyone on the Internet -- a vast, ever-growing, always up-to-date "corpus" of language ranging over an inexhaustible range of topics, geographic areas, and users.