This was an interesting week for my grammar education. As a class, we have officially dived in to more of the nitty gritty grammar—the meat and potatoes, if you will—and, for me, unfamiliar territory.
As I’ve said before, I did not get the best grammar education growing up. The grammar education I did get was punctuation. So this week talking about subjects, direct objects and the like had me attempting to reach back to things I may or may not have learned in the fourth grade. For the most part I understood what was going on. However, every now and then we’d begin to parse a sentence and I’d get it wrong. I think I understand now why student errors go up right after a new topic is introduced. Even if you think you understand what is going on, there are always little exceptions to a rule, or a confusing case where it is not obvious which answer is correct.
Another interesting thing I learned this week were the proper names for the personal pronouns. Subjective case? Objective case? I had no idea personal pronouns fit in to any concrete categories. AND I LEARNED THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF NOUNS (ABSTRACT, CONCRETE, COUNT, NONCOUNT, COLLECTIVE, PROPER, COMMON). Oh, the fun things I’m learning!
Does any one have a magical solution to parsing sentences? Is there an easy way for me to instantly recognize a subject, verb, direct object?
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ReplyDeleteThe order of Subject (Subj) Verb (Vt) and Direct Object (DO) is consistent. It’ll never reverse. SO if you can locate a verb, then you know what comes before it is likely to be a subject, and what comes after it is likely to be a DO. It’s not always the case though because a complex sentence is really complicated which will require further study.
ReplyDeleteHowever, a simple sentence structure is: Subj + V + DO.
Here is an example:
“Polite Helen and civilized Douglas are having a stormy argument of their lifetime.”
Subj: polite Helen and civilized Douglas
Vt: are having
DO: a stormy argument of their lifetime
Sarah,
ReplyDeleteI hope this helps...I thought I posted a longer explanation earlier, but someone I lost it, and I don't want to rewrite the whole thing.
well explained, Sydney.
ReplyDeleteSarah, we'll be playing with this concept for a while; we all need more practice.
Stay tuned.