Grammar Blog

Those who speak, write, and study English are typically familiar with how nouns are enhanced by adjectives and other nouns, such as appositives and subject complements. Examples The brown satchel belongs to the lawyer. (adjective describing the subject noun, satchel) Jenna is a lawyer. (subject complement renaming the subject noun, Jenna) My sister Jenna, a …

You might already know that a person who graduates from a school is considered to be an alumnus. But what's the word for several people who have completed their education at an institution? The answer lies in some basic Latin, as we'll discuss. Finding the Correct Plural Version of Alumni Many American grammar conundrums have …

Case in English concerns the function that a word performs in relation to other words in a sentence. In older English, grammar referred to the nominative case (subject), the accusative case (direct object), the dative case (indirect object), and the genitive case (possessive form). (Current English refers more often to three cases: subjective, objective, and …

Suppose you have a date coming up and want to take your partner to a place where live actors will perform in a play. If you are writing your note in American English, should you invite that person to the theatre or the theater? We'll give you a quick answer to the theatre vs. theater …

Let's say you need to speak with a boarding agent about your flight. Or perhaps you're interested in an associate's progress on a project, or you just want to see how a friend's day is coming along. Any of these inquiries might be described as “checking in.” It's an easy concept to understand and to …

Mr. Burns is wiser than I. Tara knows more about football than baseball. Yama's thinking seeks truth; his writing, the expression of it. Many of us are familiar with these types of statements in English. They are elliptical sentence constructions, which omit sentence components without losing clarity. Those components can be words, phrases, or clauses. …

Verbs are words that describe a mental or physical action, a state of being, or an occurrence. By doing so, they often give us the most information among the parts of speech in a sentence. A sentence can exist without a noun, but it cannot without a verb. Verb Definitions and Verb Examples A verb's …

The word complement in English means "something that completes or makes perfect; either of two parts or things needed to complete the whole." A subject complement in English describes or renames a sentence subject and completes the sense of the verb by means of an adjective, a noun, a pronoun, a possessive noun or pronoun, …

Imagine you're taking a walk through the forest. From the corner of your eye, you spot a quick movement followed by a mischievous giggle. Moments later you see through the brush a small, childlike creature sitting and smiling. You have discovered an elf! Just as you are thinking how you will explain this sighting to …

Way to go! If you're engaging this discussion, you have a sincere interest in understanding how specific parts of speech function in American English. Congrats! An English interjection communicates a writer's or speaker's feeling or focus in emphasizing a statement or drawing someone's attention to it. It is a reaction to someone or something. Interjections …