• Each of the entries in the Grammar Glossary deals with a particular point of English grammar. Each is on a separate “page” of the flesl.net website. The entries are linked to each other and are “targeted” by links from other areas of flesl.net. The Grammar Glossary is incomplete. (As of May 23, 2011 there are fifty-one entries. New entries appear regualrly.) There is index to the Glossary in the Grammar Directory.
• Approximately 75% of the entries — the more recent ones — are accompanied by a reference page which gives detailed information about sources. In addition, many of the reference pages also contain “further notes” which expand on and support the information in the entries themselves.
• The current Grammar Glossary supersedes an earlier glossary. This glossary contained over a hundred entries in a single long “page.” It was written, very casually, as a supplement to the “grammar and meaning notes” that accompany some of the paired stories.
- This superseded glossary is still online although there are no links to it on the current site except: HERE. Because it contains a good deal of information that is not at present available in the current Glossary, it is being kept online for the time out of consideration for anyone who happens across it through a search engine or who has preserved a link to it from an earlier version of flesl.net.
• The main reason for the decision to switch from a casual, one-page glossary to a more serious and better documented multi-page glossary was the discovery that although there were very few users coming to the glossary from the grammar and meaning notes, quite a large number were coming from to it via internet search engines. While welcome, these visits raised two concerns: in the first place it seemed unlikely that someone, searching for say “preposition” in a search engine, and being led from there to the flesl.net grammar glossary only to find nothing on the screen but several short entries beginning with the letter “a,” would then use the search box to find the entry they were looking for. Second, it seemed that the casualness of the original glossary, though perhaps appropriate for a supplement to ESL reading texts, was obviously not appropriate for a reference site.
• Since the decision to redo the Glossary in a different format was made — approximately two years ago — progress has been regular but very slow. It will be at least another year, i.e. sometime in 2012, before the current glossary contains as many entries as the original version. One reason for the slow pace of progress has been that the realization that a flesl.net glossary, if it is to be useful, has to be first and foremost a reference tool; that meant that the writing of the glossary had to become a research project. So far — as can be confirmed by glancing at the reference pages — that research has been almost entirely a matter of studying relevant sections of A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartik, a work which presumably has as much claim as any to be considered the standard authority on English grammar.