Note: The WritingEssentials blog is on hiatus. Meanwhile, favorite posts will be published with updates. Ellen ~~ To comma or not to comma? What do you do when using a comma in a series? Do you write red, white, and blue or red, white and blue? The use of comma in a series or list …
What is the Oxford or Serial Comma Controversy? Updated 1.8.21 Read More »
The past few posts have focused on subordination by dependent clauses and subordination by verbals and reduction. We use subordination to express relationships between our ideas, combining ideas and sentences of unequal importance. When we create complex sentences, we combine two independent clauses, by changing one independent clause into a dependent (subordinate) clause which contains …
We have examining the ways of using subordination, whether through dependent clauses (adverb, adjective, noun) or through verbals (infinitives, gerunds, or present and past participles). These are all examples of reduction, reducing the number of words without losing our meaning. Sentence ↓ Clause ↓ Phrase (verbal, appositive, prepositional) ↓ Word (adjective, adverb) …
In the past few posts we have been looking at complex sentences and the 3 dependent (or subordinate) clauses that form them: adverb, adjective, and noun. When we subordinate a clause, we express it in a word group that is less than a sentence (also called an independent clause). We can further reduce word groups …
The Writingessentialsbyellen.com blog has been examining English sentence types, with the most recent focus on complex sentences. Complex sentences, formed by subordinating one idea (or sentence) to another, are useful for showing the various kinds of relationship that exist among ideas. We considered the adverb clause and the adjective clause, two ways to form complex …
We have been examining English sentence types with a focus on complex sentences. In the previous post, we considered adverb clauses—clauses that are used as adverbs. This post will give attention to adjective clauses. As its name suggests, adjective clauses are clauses that are used as adjectives. We have looked in a number of posts …
When it comes to adverbial modifiers, some authors have said in the well-known advice to “kill your darlings” because “[T]he road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Despite such admonitions, some feel that these modifiers can be both useful and essential to writers. For instance in the post Advice on adverbs, I quoted Barbara Baig, …
The previous two posts focused on basic sentence types in English: the first on the simple sentence and its patterns, and the second on the other sentence types: compound, complex, and compound-complex. These are the foundations of composition, whether fiction or nonfiction. In her article on voice in writing, Darcy Pattison, who argues writers need …
Sentences have been defined as strings of words that begin with a capital letter and are punctuated with terminal punctuation—something we all recognize (though in a recent post we examined how the period has declined in electronic messages, especially texts). A sentence has also been defined as an independent clause – a word group containing …
Compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence types Read More »
We’ve already discussed how native speakers of English have an unconscious knowledge of the language’s grammar – this is true of native speakers of all languages. Nonnative speakers and English language learners have to learn the grammar, and they invariably study that of Standard English, the variety that is in power and used in academia …