Writer's Choice Grade 11

Unit 10: Parts of Speech

Overview

You can't build a house without using the proper materials—wood, drywall, bricks, nails, shingles, and so forth. Similarly, you can't build sentences without correctly using the parts of speech—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Misusing a noun or adverb is like nailing shingles to the floor or stapling insulation to the wrong side of the drywall. If you can correctly identify and use the various parts of speech, you will construct sturdy, useful, and attractive sentences and paragraphs. Keep reading to review some parts of speech.

Nouns and Pronouns:

As you probably know, a noun names a person, a place, a thing, or an idea. A concrete noun names an object that occupies space or that can be recognized by any of the senses (e.g., sugar or clay); whereas, an abstract noun names an idea, a quality, or a characteristic (e.g., grief or optimism). A pronoun takes the place of a noun, a group of words acting as a noun, or another pronoun, and must agree in number and gender with its antecedent. A reflexive pronoun refers back to an earlier noun or pronoun in a sentence; whereas an intensive pronoun adds emphasis to another noun or pronoun.

Verbs:

A verb is a word that expresses action or a state of being and is a necessary part of a sentence. A transitive verb is an action verb that is followed by a word or words that answer the questions what? or whom? An action verb that is not followed by a word that answers these questions is called an intransitive verb.

Adjectives and Adverbs:

An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by limiting its meaning; whereas an adverb modifies a verb, an adjective, or another adverb by making its meaning more specific. Both adjectives and adverbs have comparative and superlative forms that are used to indicate the degrees of comparison. The definite article (the) and indefinite articles (a and an) are adjectives. The word not and the contraction -n't are adverbs.

Prepositions, Conjunctions, and Interjections:

A preposition is a word that shows the relationship of a noun or a pronoun to another word in a sentence. Conjunctions join single words or groups of words. A subordinating conjunction joins two clauses or ideas to make one grammatically dependent upon the other. Conjunctive adverbs are used to clarify the relationship between clauses of equal weight in a sentence. Finally, an interjection is a word or a phrase that does not have a grammatical connection to other words in a sentence; it expresses emotion or exclamation.