Life On A B-I7

Adjectives are used to describe nouns and pronouns. They can also describe other adjectives. They are used to tell how many, what kind, or which ones.

There are a couple special adjectives, but their function is the same.

Demonstrative: this, that, these, those.

Proper: Thanksgiving dinner, Italian food, Catholic religion.

Articles are sometimes thought to stand alone, but they are a type of adjective. The words: a, an, and the, are articles.

Most verbs are action words. Verbs can also indicate mental actions.

Every sentence needs a verb, to be a sentence.

There are also linking verbs. The most common linking verbs are is, am, are, will be, was, has been, have been, and so on. Tip: Usually if you can substitute a form of the words to be, and the sentence still makes sense, you have a linking verb. (A linking verb can also be an action verb, depending on context.)

The tense of a verb tells you when the action took place. Verbs are the only parts of speech with tense. These are the tenses: present, past, further, present perfect, past perfect, future perfect. The helping verbs specify the tenses. Helping verbs are words like will, have, and have beeen.

This is all very opaque as far as I’m concerned, just remember this. You can tell if a word is a verb by putting the word to in front of it. Here are some examples, to jump, to think, to be, to study, to allow.

Good luck, Grammar is like computer programming… there are a LOT of rules to follow!

Parts of Speech - Pronouns

Pronouns take the place of nouns. “Her” is a pronoun, it takes the place of someone’s name, as in: Mary baked her pizza.

Common pronouns: I, you, he, she, them, they, we, us, him, her, and it.

An Antecedent is the word the pronoun is standing in for. A pronoun may or may not have an antecedent depending on the voice being used. “He showed the manager her report,” has no antecedent.

Tip: Pronouns must agree in gender and number (singular or plural) with their antecedents. Make sure your antecedents are clear or you will confuse your reader.

Here is some more pronoun trivia (more than you probably want to know):

1. Interrogative Pronouns ask questions.
2. Personal Pronouns come in three varieties, First Person, Second Person, and Third Person.
3. Demonstrative Pronouns tend to give direction or state ownership.
4. Relative Pronouns are Interrogative Pronouns that don’t ask a question.
5. Intensive/Reflexive Pronouns have “self” at the end of the word and refer back to the subject of the sentence.
6. Indefinite Pronouns are pronouns that are not one of the five types listed above (simply put).

Introduction to My Study of English Grammar

It’s taken me 72 years to realize that I really don’t know a great deal about my own native language (American) English. It’s never too late to learn something new, so for the foreseeable future (I don’t have a strict timeline for this endeavor) I’m going to take it upon myself to learn a thing or two about the English language. Here’s a perfect example, I don’t know if the word “language” in the previous sentence should be capitalized or not.

Be that as it may, I’m going to try and learn something (finally) about proper grammar, punctuation, capitalization and word usage. Wish me luck. Since I love to write, this can only help to improve my writing. Also, the rebel in me says there is so much bad writing on the internet today that I don’t want to be a part of that, so, I better get my proverbial stuff together. Becoming a better writer is my goal. Better speaking is another matter. So many people judge you by your words, I think I will continue to talk just like I always have, so as not to alienate anyone that I haven’t already managed to alienate by this point in my life.

An interesting side-bar here: I’m using the book “The Best Grammar Workbook Ever!” By Arlene Miller. This is not her first grammar book. She knows what she’s talking about. The book opens with a 100 question pre-test. I took the test and got a score of 68 out of 100. I consider that to be pretty good given the circumstances of my education and upbringing. (Probably above average compared to most people.) I asked my partner to take the test also. I consider her to be better educated and smarter than I am. I thought I would get smoked. Oddly enough, she scored 68 also. We both got a good laugh out of that! (It made me feel better too.) When I finish this course of study, I will casually suggest that we both take the final test… to see if our pre-test scores were a true reflection of our relative grammatical strength. I don’t plan to tell her I’m undertaking this study, and she doesn’t read this blog either… I’m looking forward to the results of the final test. That may be a bit harsh of me. I will confess that I studied for it… at some point…

This is the introduction to my grammatical study that follows, I make no claims about the “correctness” of the grammar used in the above paragraphs.