Grammar Blog

Winter might be coming, or you might have a spring in your step. The seasons tell us a lot about climate, mood, and even which fashions and foods are in style. But grammatically, they can sometimes summon a headache. For instance, do you know if you should capitalize the names of seasons when you’re writing …

English includes several different types of pronouns, such as personal, demonstrative, relative, indefinite, reflexive, and possessive pronouns. In this review, we'll examine what interrogative pronouns are. An interrogative pronoun introduces a question that seeks information. If the pronoun is not part of a question, it is not an interrogative pronoun. There are five interrogative pronouns: …

One of the ironies of education is that many people receive four-year degrees in the U.S. each year but aren’t sure whether their achievement needs to be written with an apostrophe. Even if you did well in English and grammar courses earlier on, such a detail may not be something you address every day. Do …

You probably use a and an in writing and speech every day. Do you also know which one is proper in each usage? In today’s post we’ll clear up any confusion you might have about a and an. Both a and an are indefinite articles, which are words that refer to a person or a …

As we often like to remind our readers, once you get further into the finer aspects of English grammar, the underlying concepts are often very accessible. Which brings us to the topic of today’s post: what are possessive adjectives? Possessive Adjectives: What They Are and How to Use Them Possessive adjectives are words that come …

An adverb is a part of speech that modifies other sentence elements such as verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. It may also describe infinitives, gerunds, participles, phrases, clauses, or even the rest of the sentence in which it appears. Adverbs address information such as when (she is leaving now), where (she stops here), how (she …

In today’s post we will look at prepositions, objects, and the relationship between the two. With that knowledge, you’ll have greater insight into another fine point of English grammar. What Is a Preposition? A preposition is a word that usually comes before a noun or pronoun and expresses a relationship to another word. In other …

English grammar has its share of technical terms, so unless you regularly teach or study the language, you might furrow your eyebrows if you hear things such as present perfect tense or infinitive verb. Many of us may use such components in our writing and speech without being fully aware of what they are. That …

Last week we discussed subject pronouns. Now we'll look at object pronouns. An object pronoun replaces a noun that is in the object position of a sentence. This means that it receives rather than performs the action of the sentence. Similar to subject pronouns, object pronouns add economy to language by helping us avoid redundancy …

The basics of English grammar can seem simple, especially when we are looking at sentence structures. Three basic components of a sentence include: Nouns, which are things Verbs, which are actions Adjectives, which are descriptive words But the better you get, the more complexities there are. For instance, did you know that there are such …