New material on the implications of corpus data and an introduction to systems networks is included; and there is greater emphasis on the exploration of how grammatical analysis can illuminate meaning at text and discourse level. Much of the content has been reorganised and made more user-friendly in response to feedback from students as well as teachers and other linguists. There are numerous worked examples to illustrate the analysis at each stage, as well as practice activities for the reader to try out. It can be used either as a comprehensive course book in its own right or as a means of preparing students for the more theoretical treatment of grammar as presented in Halliday's book.