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Nominalization: When Verbs Become Nouns

We recently discussed how nouns can be made into verbs, a practice referred to as verbing: e.g., Why don't you friend me on Facebook? Within its dynamic fluidity, English also often uses verbs as nouns or turns verbs into them, a process known as nominalization. Examples Let's go for a walk. What an epic fail. …

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New Words in the Dictionary

Language is the system we use to speak, write, and sign (manually) to express ourselves within our social groups. Distinctive to our species, it gives us a powerful means to inform, play, imagine, persuade, and release (e.g., our feelings). While a specific number can vary, many estimates suggest that English includes more than one million …

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Assonance: Definition and Examples

Language provides more than the means to express and deliver ideas and information. It also bears the power to please us through the tools we use to shape it. Thoughtful, eloquent communication can satisfy the outer and inner ear as much as awaken the mind. One technique that attracts us to writing and speech is …

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Past Progressive Tense: Definition and Examples

We use verb tense in English to communicate when an action or state of being occurred. We also combine verb tense with grammatical aspect, which further indicates time-related characteristics such as the tense's duration, completion, or repetition. English has three tenses (past, present, future) and four aspects (simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive), creating twelve primary …

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Past Perfect Progressive

We use verb tenses in English to express if an action is in the past, present, or future. We also use what is referred to as grammatical aspect, which indicates time-related traits such as the repetition, completion, or length of an action. The four aspects are the simple tense, the perfect tense, the progressive tense, …

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Transitional Words and Phrases

Each writer's art is the formation of voice and technique over time. The more we write, the more we find and reveal thoughts and words connected only as we might convey them. The more we study and apply the principles for shaping good writing, the more eloquent and precise we can become. Writing differs from …

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Verbals: Definition & Examples

English includes words that look and sound like verbs but are not serving a sentence as such. You likely hear them often: You said you like skydiving? What about cliff jumping? The door was closed, so I couldn't hear them—their voices were muffled. Alexander said their plan is to escape. Each underlined word is an …

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Present Perfect Progressive (Continuous) Tense

English uses tense to indicate the timing of a verb's action in the present, the past, or the future. Traditional English includes twelve tenses: present X simple past progressive future perfect perfect progressive In this discussion, we'll review the present perfect progressive tense, which is also referred to as the present perfect continuous. Present Perfect …

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What Is the Plural of Puppy?

Few things are as enjoyable as having a puppy run around you in playful joy. Perhaps the only improvement is having more than one puppy around. If you find yourself in such a favorable circumstance, how do you spell the plural of such a cheerful group? For that matter, how do you spell other English …

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What Is a Predicate Adjective?

Paulina seems optimistic. The blueberry muffins smell delightful. That essay is certain to persuade people. Most of us will be familiar with sentences such as these. We may even find ourselves using such expressions daily, as they contain a common structure for describing something in writing or speech. Each sentence includes a subject, a verb …

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