Humanities 1: Writing Well, Elementary Grammar
Grammar is the system and structure of a language. In this first unit on grammar, we will likely review many concepts you are familiar with, but that are critical for you to know well. Remember, that irrespective of what your chosen field is, the ability to communicate clearly and effectively is not optional.
1. The Sentence
The most basic unit of English is either the sentence of the exclamation. Exclamations are singular words or short phrases that usually convey a clear emotion like “wow”, “oh”, or “huh?”. These are easy to understand and relatively exceptional so we won’t spend much more time on them.
In English, sentences consists of either a subject verb or a subject verb object.
The subject of a sentence is the actor or the person who the sentence is principally about.
The verb is the action of the sentence.
The object is the recipient of the action of the verb or a descriptor for the subject.
These definitions are currently all overly simplified, but they will suffice. Consider the following two sentences:
Jason writes.
Jason writes books.
They are both complete sentences and I have color coded them so that you can better discern what the subject, verb, and object are. Notice that even fairly complicated sentences can be broken down into this structure:
Jason’s friend, Jordan, will write ten books.
2. The Subject and Predicate
The subject of a sentence is the thing the sentence is primarily about. Usually the subject of a sentence occurs early in the sentence. The predicate of a sentence contains the verb and generally makes a statement about the subject.
The lizard is truly the master of the animal kingdom.
Spanish moss is not originally from Spain.
While stealing staples from the office supply closet, Brian was caught red-handed!
3. Sentence Structure
Here, we will think about different types of sentence structures such as interrogative, imperative, and exclamatory. The following color-coded examples gives you examples. Interrogative sentences are questions and these are generally indicated with the inclusion of certain key words like when, where, what, and who. There are, however many interrogative statements that simply change word order. Imperative statements are directions or orders. They have the understand subject of you or you (plural). Finally, exclamatory statements provide an emotional reaction. It is permissible for exclamatory statements to be generally ungrammatical as long as they make sense in context. It is considered inadvisable to include exclamatory statements in formal writing.
When are you coming home?
Is that right? (The statement would be: That is right.)
Eat your vegetables.
What a great idea!
4. Parts of Speech
Generally speaking, we divide the words used to make up sentences into the parts of speech. These are broad categories that help us to understand the function of a word. One reason this is particularly useful across many languages is that most languages contain roughly the same parts of speech. Additionally, most languages have a way to convert one part of speech into another. Below, you will see the common parts of speech defined. If you hover over the definition, it will present some examples.
Nouns
These are persons, places, or things. They may be proper (specifically named persons, places, or things) or improper (generic persons, places, or things).
Pronouns
Pronouns take the place of a noun. They are helpful in making your writing sound less repetitive, though they may reduce the clarity if used injudiciously.
Verbs
Express the action of a sentence. They may be transitive (take an object) or intransitive (take no object). Some verbs take different meanings depending on which way they are used.
Adjectives
These describe nouns- only nouns!
Adverbs
Adverbs describes adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs. They are almost always formed by adding “ly” to the end of a word.
Conjunctions
They join related ideas together or help to make lists more readable. And, or, neither, nor, either, and but are most of the common conjuctions.
Prepositions
These describe relationships between objects. They may also be adopted as part of a verb phrase to specify a particular meaning of the verb.
Articles
The rat directed a cat to those hats.
5. Punctuation
The simplest elements of punctuation are the period, the question mark, and the exclamation mark scene below:
. ? !
The period indicates the end of sentence and the beginning of a new one. The question mark indicates an interrogative statement: a question. The exclamation mark indicates emphasis: surprise, joy, excitement.
6. Transformations
In English, we often say words share a root and different parts of speech may be formed by combining roots, prefixes, and suffixes. You might not have been familiar with the example adjective “indomitable”, but you have probably herd the verb “dominate”. It means to “to take control over another person, thing, or group”. The prefix “in” means not and the suffix “able” is a common way to turn a verb into an adjective. Therefore, we can conclude that indomitable means “incapable of being dominated” or, more succinctly, “impossible to defeat”.
Suffixes like “able”, “ive”, “ed”, and “ful” help use to transform words from part of speech to another. Unfortunately, while there are rules and guidelines for how to do this, there are so many violations of these rules and guidelines that trial and error or reading are usually the best way to gain insight into which should be used and when.
Look at the verb “to cooperate”. “cooperate” which means “to work together” becomes “cooperative” meaning “willing to work together”. Words ending in “ate” usually become “ative” in the adjective form. But, for instance, the verb “to plate” means “to arrange food before presenting to a diner on a dish”. We do not say the food is “plative”, but rather talk about “plated” food. Similarly, the verb “to gate” becomes “gated”. Some adjectives are just wholly irregular and they are usually derived from verbs with irregular conjugations. Observe below.
He stole the cash and got away!
He got away with the stolen cash.
We already saw that it is easy to transform most adjectives into adverb by adding “ly” or “ily” in some cases. Note that it is possibly for an adjective to share this suffix. For instance, “silly” can be either an adjective or adverb. Words that end in a “y” generally do not take another “ly”, but there are, of course, exceptions in English.
Silly chairs can be dangerous. (“silly” is adjective.)
Her dancing looked silly. (Here “silly” describes the look of her dancing.)
Empty eyes stared out at me.
His eyes stared out at me emptily.
(These two sentences also say subtly different things: first, his eyes give the appearance of emptiness and, next, his stare is empty.)