Trivium Home School · The first art
The Art of Grammar
A year of grammar in the Great Library of Alexandria, from the verb “to be” to the art of the speech. Every chapter comes twice: as a full lesson with exercises that go up to C2, and as a comic strip with Sophia, Philo, Marcos and Demetria. Each shows its grammar point and level.
Grammar is the first of the three arts of the trivium. The Art of Logic picks up where it leaves off, and The Art of Rhetoric follows. What is the trivium?
Begin here
Three short comics: the characters, what a word is, and what words do.
Everyone Arrives at Once
Meet Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria at the doors of the Great Library, where four people name one year four different ways.
Read the comic →Four Things Called Word
Spoken, written, thought and classified: one word turns out to mean four different things, and grammar cares about only one of them.
Read the comic →What Words Do
Noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection: the eight jobs a word can hold.
Read the comic →Where grammar meets logic
What a word means and what it names: the same ground seen from logic, in The Art of Logic.
The Three Arts: What Logic Is For
Grammar, logic and rhetoric: three arts of one language, and what logic is for.
Words and Terms: One Word, Several Meanings
Words and terms: one word, several meanings, and the art of noticing the difference.
The Categories: Ten Questions About Anything
Aristotle’s ten categories, and the ten questions you can ask about anything.
The free chapters
The verb “to be” and the first six lessons of the year, each with its comic strip.
The One Who Is
The verb to be; there is / there are; be to, the subjunctive be, being
In which Philo asks a question older than any grammar lesson, Sophia takes the verb “to be” apart at the foot of the burning bush, and Aristotle finds the one answer he cannot sort.
The Instant and the Standing Rule
Present simple and present continuous; stative verbs; the historic present
In which Marcos is caught drifting off mid-argument, and Sophia turns the catching of him into a lesson about two different kinds of “now.”
An Incident with a Shelf
Past simple, past continuous, used to and would; the unreal and polite past
In which a basket falls, a shelf takes the blame, and Sophia proves that the past has more than one way of happening.
Two Points Joined
The perfect aspect: present and past perfect, simple and continuous
In which a swept aisle is not as swept as claimed, and Sophia shows that a verb can tie two moments together with a single rope — and that the rope itself can show a result, or the pulling.
A Wager
Future forms: will, going to, present tenses, future continuous, perfect and perfect continuous; be bound / likely to; be about to, on the verge of; shall, set to
In which Marcos bets against the harbour, loses before he knows it, and Sophia counts out six different ways of meaning “later.”
A Verb That Doesn’t Verb
Linking verbs: be, seem, look, become…; go, turn, grow, fall
In which Philo looks tired without doing anything at all, and Sophia shows that some verbs only join — they never act.
How Sure, How Allowed, How Obliged
Modal verbs: deduction, permission, ability, obligation and advice; modal perfects
In which an ink jar shatters, Marcos stands accused, and the library discovers that a handful of small verbs are doing four entirely different jobs at once.
The parts of speech
Lessons 7–13: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and phrasal verbs.
A Name for Everything
Nouns: common and proper, countable and uncountable, plurals; nominalisation
In which a shipment of spice turns out to be a whole grammar lesson, and Sophia sorts nouns by what they actually are.
In Her Place
Pronouns: personal, possessive, reflexive, relative, indefinite; singular they
In which the library gets tired of saying “Cassia” and Sophia introduces the word that stands in for a name once everyone already knows it.
A Beautiful Small Old Round Black Box
Adjectives: position, order, comparison, -ed / -ing
In which an uncatalogued box turns out to be the perfect specimen for every rule an adjective obeys.
Carefully, Rarely, Almost Never
Adverbs: manner, position, frequency, degree, good / well; focusing and comment adverbs
In which the old box turns out to hide a mechanism, and Sophia lets it wind up a lesson on everything an adverb can touch.
Joining the Pieces
Conjunctions: coordinating, subordinating, correlative, conjunctive adverbs
In which a torn letter turns out to be missing nothing but its joints, and Sophia shows what holds a sentence together when the pieces themselves are already sound.
The Space Between Things
Prepositions of place, movement and time; dependent prepositions
In which the torn letter turns out to be a map, and every small word in it turns out to be load-bearing.
Up, Off, and Away
Phrasal verbs: separable and inseparable, three-part verbs
In which soot proves an unexpectedly good teacher, and one small word after a verb turns out to change everything about it.
Sentences and clauses
Lessons 14–25: conditionals, reported speech, the passive, inversion, relative and noun clauses.
If We Open It
Conditionals: zero, first, second, third and mixed; beyond will and would
In which a locked chest turns four friends into hypothesists, and every shade of “maybe” finally gets a grammar of its own.
Once Removed
Reported speech: say / tell, reporting verbs, tense and time shifts, questions; it is said that
In which a two-thousand-year-old diary teaches everyone that repeating someone’s words is never quite the same as keeping them.
To Go, or Going
Gerunds and infinitives
In which a diary’s fate hangs on a decision that turns out to be, grammatically, a choice between two disguises for the same verb.
Dangling by a Participle
Participle clauses; dangling participles
In which Marcos crosses a scaffold plank over a stairwell, and learns that a misplaced participle can be just as unsteady as the plank itself.
A Question of Order
Questions: yes / no, wh-, tag, embedded and negative questions
In which the scholar demands answers, and the group discovers that even being interrogated is, quietly, a grammar lesson.
Never Had She Expected
Inversion: never, only, so / such, locative
In which the evening’s verdict finally arrives, and Sophia reaches for a sentence dramatic enough to match it.
Nobody Broke It
The passive: all tenses, with modals, the get-passive; have something done
In which the official record gets written, and Marcos discovers that grammar can be a remarkably convenient place to hide.
A Box, The Box, No Box At All
Articles and determiners: a / the / zero article, possessives, demonstratives
In which a catalog entry finally gets written, and the smallest words in the sentence turn out to have been running the whole show.
None of Them Agree
Subject–verb agreement
In which proofreading the library’s own report turns up a small army of subjects and verbs that refuse to see eye to eye.
One Idea, or Several
Sentence types: simple, compound, complex; fragments; clefts and rhythm
In which a choppy paragraph about a box gets rebuilt, one clause at a time, into something worth reading aloud.
Which Is Essential, and Which Isn’t
Relative clauses: defining and non-defining, that / which
In which a shipping clerk, faced with writing “Cassia” fourteen times, discovers what a relative clause can do for a tired hand.
What Happened Is the Subject
Noun clauses: as subject, object and complement; whether; the subjunctive
In which Philo names the one clause Sophia’s whole discipline had somehow left unnamed, and a set of three finally comes together.
Writing and speaking
Lessons 26–34: from the paragraph to the essay, the letter and the speech.
One Idea, Properly Escorted
Paragraph structure: topic sentences, unity, coherence
In which correct sentences finally learn to speak to each other, and the scholar hands out a whole year’s worth of reasons to keep practicing.
What Happened, In the Order It Happened
Narrative writing: structure, narrative tenses, showing not telling
In which the first of eight assignments turns out to need far more than a list of true events in order.
A Reason to Keep Reading
Article writing: the hook, addressing the reader, headings
In which Philo learns that being factually correct and being worth reading are, disappointingly, two separate skills.
Worth Finding
Review writing: description, verdict, evaluative language
In which Marcos discovers that cataloguing a diary and judging one turn out to be entirely different skills.
For the Record, In Full
Report writing: purpose, headings, formal register, recommendations
In which the clerk finally gets a form of writing built for exactly his temperament — and learns it demands more discipline than he expected.
Two Sides, Weighed on Purpose
Essay writing: thesis, argument, counterargument, conclusion
In which Philo takes on the clerk’s own recommendation, and learns that disagreeing well is its own careful discipline.
A Plan, Not Yet a Fact
Proposal writing: aims, suggestions, persuasive modals
In which Demetria settles what Philo’s essay only argued about, and discovers a proposal doesn’t have to choose a side so much as design a compromise worth approving.
The Same News, Twice Over
Letter writing: formal and informal register
In which Marcos writes the same true story twice, and learns that a reader shapes a letter every bit as much as the news itself does.
Said Aloud, and Meant
Oratory: the rule of three, repetition, rhetorical questions
In which Marcos stands before the Council with nothing to cross out and no second draft coming, and a year of lessons finally has to fit inside one spoken sentence.