Parts of Speech for the Timid Writer
Mervyn Love
Dear writers, we are gathered here today to bring together these Nine Parts of Speech into a holy matrix of well turned out sentences which, by the grace of God, no publisher or editor shall cast asunder. A bit hesitant about parts of speech? Don't know your verbs from your conjunctions? Read on...
1. Adjective. This is a word that adds a description to an object, person, place etc.
Example: 'Mary's house had a lovely blue door'. 'Door' is the object whilst 'lovely' and 'blue' describe what sort of door it is, These are adjectives that describe said door. Simple, eh?
2. Verb. As my English teacher used to say "A verb is a 'doing' word". It indicates movement; something going on. And here's the clincher: a word is a verb if you can put the word 'to' in front of it and it still makes sense. So we can have: to fly, to gyrate, to digest, to hallucinate. You can't have 'to digestion', unless you're proposing a toast.
If you're feeling particularly bright today you may jump up and ask: 'What's the difference between fly, flew and flying? You can't say "to flew" can you?' Quite right, but 'flew' is the past tense of 'fly' so it's still a verb. 'Flying' however, describes what a plane, for example, is doing, so it's an adjective.
3. Adverb. These are similar to adjectives except that this time they describe a verb. So we can say 'the plane flew swiftly through the sky'. 'Flew' is the 'doing' or action word, 'quickly' describes how the action was done. Again: 'She watched the horse gracefully canter around the course.' 'Canter' is the verb (to canter) and 'gracefully' is the adverb describing how the horse cantered.
4. Article. These are so simple they're boring. Yaawn! An article is one of three little words we use all the time: 'a', 'an' and 'the'. I read recently that they are "used to signal the presence of a noun". Gosh, what does that mean? Put simply it means they go before the name of something, like: 'a brick flew out of his hand...' Or: 'the brick hit Rodney on the nose.' Or: 'an brick fell off the wall'. No, no that's not right. We use 'an' when the next word starts with a vowel. OK, so: 'an extruded brick fell off the wall'. (Yes, there really are such things - I looked it up.) 'A' and 'an' are known as indefinite articles because they could refer to just any old brick, whereas 'the' is the definite article when we're talking about a specific brick.
5. Noun. This is simply the actual name of something, like: door, bicycle, sandwich, skyscraper. Or it could be a person: Bill, Maisy, Trayci, Algernon, Kerryn. How easy is that?
6. Pronoun. A substitute for a noun: he, she, it, that. So instead of: 'Trayci stamped on Algernon's foot' (the little minx!), we could say 'she stamped on Algernon's foot' providing it is clear who the 'she' was in the first place. We don't want readers thinking it was Maisy, do we? She would never do such a thing.
7. Preposition. The secret here is the word hidden within 'preposition'. Got it? Yes, it's the word 'position'. A preposition describes where something (a noun) is situated (its position) in relation to something else (another noun). Not so simple this, but a couple of examples should make it clear:
'The telephone (noun) was on (preposition) the table (noun). 'The telephone gyrated gracefully three feet above (preposition) the table.' (Fantasy writers take note!)
8. Conjunction. Conjunctions such as 'and', 'or', 'for', 'because', or 'yet' are words that join words, phrases, and clauses together. There are more of these than you can shake a past participal at so we won't go too deep. And to make matters worse you can have different types of conjunctions. Scary.
Let's be satisfied with: Bread 'and' butter; I love Mary's door 'because' it's my favourite colour; They could find neither hair 'nor' hide of him.
Besides, I'm nearly out of single quotes.
9. Interjection. One of my favourite parts of speech this. Is it! Gosh! I didn't know that! Yes, dear reader, these remarks are interjections because they show surprise. They are exclamations, and they can stand alone even though they are often not proper sentences. Amazing!
So there you have it. You can go out into the literary world proudly confident that you can now amaze your friends and grandchildren with your arcane knowledge. Just don't show off too much. No-one likes a clever cloggs.
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