teaching grammar

Errors with Prepositions

Tweet This series of posts is about the error patterns in my students’ sentences. The errors interfere with clarity, flow, and aesthetics. There are so many occurrences of basic errors that my conclusion is not that the students are inattentive or sloppy, but that they have never been taught how to construct a solid English […]

A confession

Tweet What do you do when a college freshman, who has passed the required classes and tests to get into college, says the Subject of the sentence, After being forced to look into a deeper meaning I realized how that one little factor could alter your mood, is “mood?”  (Please ignore the other problems with […]

September 11th, 9-11, 9/11 – Words from our worst day

Tweet We still are not sure how to refer to that awful day — is it “nine eleven” or “September 11th?” As a society, we’re still vacillating. In 2001, 9-11 (or equivalents) was the Word of the Year, according to the American Dialect Society. In 2002, it was Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). What do […]

Testing for sentence fragments

Tweet We use sentence fragments all the time in conversation.  All speakers recall what has been said before and are familiar with the attitudes and expectations of the people they are speaking with.  A person might even say, “Coming?” which is obviously not a full sentence, but given a clear context, it would be easily […]

Language is the bedfellow of politics

Tweet There has been a debate among linguists about the language used by the rioters who shook up England recently — they are using slang and “bad grammar.” I’m not British, so I’m making some assumptions here, but it seems to me that the very thing that these young people want to do is to […]

The skeleton sentence expanded

Tweet Language probably began when people gave names to things, people, and actions. It has developed into a sophisticated, flexible instrument since then.  The language in the exercise below is akin to a primitive pidgin, but was probably the way our earliest ancestors spoke when language was first developing. Exercise: Take the skeletal sentence elements […]

What does “have” mean?

Tweet What does have mean?  Consider these sentences: I have seen him                                   I had a baby last week I have the flu                                       I have the answer I have a husband                                 Have fun In the first sentence, “I have seen him,” have is purely grammatical and has no independent meaning (see previous post, Concrete and Grammatical […]

Nouns Verbs and Modifiers

Tweet Nouns, verbs, and modifiers are at the heart of sentence creation. The previous post suggested exercises in which students formed three-word sentences, but without a Direct Object, such as Mary yawned loudly, The cat sat quietly, John ran away, and further suggested that the students change the adverbs (loudly, quietly, and away) to prepositional phrases. […]

Verbs Nouns and Modifiers

Tweet 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 […]

Nouns, Verbs, Modifiers

Tweet The vast majority of language is made up of nouns, verbs, and modifiers. The use of each has its peculiarities, and every language handles them differently. Nouns are or are not accompanied by articles, there is no universal set of verb tenses, and modifiers are usually placed flexibly. I write “usually” because I don’t […]