Verbs Nouns and Modifiers

The heart of language is verbs, nouns, and modifiers. I gave a simple verb exercise last time, in which students wrote a three-element sentence, Subject/Verb/Object; for example, John plays basketball.

If you are teaching a formal linguistics class, there are many terms and concepts that would be introduced at this point, but for purposes of a writing class, the objective is to raise awareness of the structure of language, so there is no need to discuss “Verb Raising,” and “Tag Question Formation,” “AGENT,” and “PATIENT,” etc. For a writer, words and grammar are a jungle gym, not an operating table, and that is as it should be.

Exercise: Ask your students to form groups and write ten examples of other three-element sentences, only this time with no direct object.  Examples:  Mary yawned loudly, The cat sat quietly, John ran away.

Here is a listing of verbs they might use:  appear, arrive, begin, break, come, cough, decrease, die, disappear, drown, fall, go, happen, increase, laugh, lie (tell an untruth), matter, rain, rise, sneeze, snow, stop, swim, wait, work

Once they have their ten sentences, ask them to replace the adverbs (loudly, quietly, and away) with something that most students have barely ever heard of, prepositional phrases.  Mary yawned during the movie, The cat sat in a corner, John ran up the hill.

This can lead to a discussion of prepositional phrases if you like, but on another day. The exercises suggested in this blog are supposed to take only ten minutes or so.

grammar exercises, linguistics, linguistics in the classroom, sentence exercises, Syntax, teaching grammar, teaching writing

Syntax, Teaching Writing, Uncategorized