covers only enough of the details to account for perhaps 95% of the problems (by text frequency) that the student will meet.
A good reference grammar aims at 99% coverage, but the extra 4% may quadruple the length and difficulty of the treatment, and the 'reference' grammar may be too cumbersome for ordinary students to refer to.
Gage (1970, p.3) recognizes that fa compact overview can serve as…a sort of road map to orient the more sophisticated learner to what to expect in his studies,' and goes on to suggest (p.5) that 'the development of students' structural synopses is perhaps the most rewarding direction for efforts to supply aid to students of neglected languages in the near future…Considerable benefit for the learnerscan be expected from a project of rather manageable scope…In spite of the great need for dictionaries, it is at least questionable that the benefit to students per man-year invested in one is as great as that obtainable from structural synopses.'
Another advantage of the synopsis format is that it lends itself to pseudo-self-instructional treatment. It need not stop with presenting examples for each point, as a reference grammar does. It can provide opportunities, within a very limited vocabulary, for the student to test his understanding of what he has read, and it can do this at the end of every paragraph. It may do so by matching each set of examples with one or more self-testing frames. In the Swahili synopsis (Appendix N, PP.272-283) the self-testing frames are on the right-hand pages, opposite the corresponding sections of the synopsis on the left-hand pages.
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