Grammar Without Rules: The Visual Method Students Actually Enjoy

I used to explain grammar by telling students “the rules”. However, I found that even after studying rules, students still had trouble using the grammar. This left me wondering:

• I learned English as a child without grammar rules. Are rules the best way to study grammar?
• Rules are complex, and don’t always hold true. Do my students really need them?

I stopped teaching rules and focused on communication.
But I soon found just speaking is not enough.
Students want support and feedback and want to understand.

This made me question the very nature of rules themselves, are they really the best way to learn?

The point of having a rule is to bypass understanding. You do it because it’s the rule, nothing more. With a traditional rule-based approach, students are left with a collection of points–there is so much to remember, and they often feel overwhelmed when they try to communicate in real-life situations.

The approach taken in Grammar Without Rules is centered on familiarity and understanding. It shows you how to help students become familiar with common phrases and patterns of English, and how to help them understand in a connected way: through images and simple explanations that apply any time people use the grammar. You present grammar as a connected system, and everything you teach builds on what your students already know.

Grammar Without Rules is about approaching grammar visually, through images you can draw on the fly to help your students understand any grammar in any context. Students can see differences in meaning and nuance.

• For beginners: images make it easy to understand meanings of basic grammar that will always hold true.
• For intermediate and advanced learners: images are a powerful tool that helps them understand how one grammar pattern is interpreted differently in different contexts. This helps them understand nuance and make better grammatical choices to communicate with more precision and clarity.

Grammar Without Rules gives you a way to teach grammar that is relatable, deepens understanding, and supports real communication. Students don’t just remember grammar; they use it to understand others and express themselves with confidence.