Two of my ongoing challenges are grammar and punctuation. Quite frankly, I am horrible at both. This is not by design. This is simply because many years have elapsed since I have learned grammar usage rules. So, things like dangling participles, subordinate clauses and prepositions, while somewhere within the recesses of my mind, are difficult to recall. And therefore, my writing suffers. I am not unique in this regard. Each day, as a society, our grammar and punctuation suffers. And we allow this to happen because we readily adopt the popular shortcuts used for texting and email. With texting, by and large, full sentence use, punctuation and spelling have just simply been discarded. And this is a shame. Things like OMG and LMAO are commonplace abbreviation for more colorful terms. I find myself taking these very same shortcuts. It's easy. But unfortunately, the message suffers when we do this. Sometimes the emotion, the passion, the feelings behind the message is lost in a jumbo of consonants. And I, for one, say stop it. I've decided to go back to the basics and to learn this grammar thing all over again. Why don't you join me. Today, I am going to start with the 8 parts of speech. In the coming days and weeks I will explain each part of speech in more depth, but for now, I will just give a basic overview of them. The 8 parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
- Noun - A noun is a word that is used to name a person, place or thing.
- Pronoun - A pronoun is a word used in place of a noun.
- Adjective - An adjective is used to modify an noun or a pronoun.
- Verb - A verb expresses action or helps to make a statement.
- Adverb -An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb.
- Preposition - A preposition shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to some other word in the sentence.
- Conjunction - A conjunction joins words or groups of words.
Granted, these are very basic definitions of the eight parts of speech but over the coming week, I will describe each more fully and in fact, introduce new grammar terms and topics along the way.
