Chapter 8

Parts of Speech

We’re born to love grammar. We are taught to hate it.

—Max Morenberg, Doing Grammar

When talking about parts of speech, grammarians have traditionally placed words into nine categories: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections. (Some contemporary grammarians add other categories.1… add other categories. Some writers on grammar now consider that there are only eight parts of speech—they consider determiners to be a kind of adjective—while others identify twelve parts of speech. See R.L. Trask, The Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar. ) The first four of these parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs—are called content parts of speech, because they convey content (meaning) to the minds of readers. The next three—determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions—are known as structural parts of speech; instead of conveying content themselves, they help structure, or organize, the content words. Pronouns and interjections have their own particular work to do. Let’s take a look at each of these in turn.

Parts of Speech 1: Content Parts of Speech

Content Parts of Speech 1: Nouns

When grammarians call a word a noun, they mean that it does a certain kind of work: the work of naming. So a noun is a word that names something: a person, a place, a thing, a condition, a state of being, an idea, a quality, and so on. The words summer and river are nouns; so are the words love and peace, Rebecca and Varitek. English contains more nouns than any other part of speech.

Some people believe that, of all the parts of speech, nouns have the most power. That’s because a noun can, all by itself, make something happen in a reader’s mind: It can bring a concept to mind, or create a picture. Read the following words one at a time and notice what happens in your mind. Lake. Doughnut. Dog. Love. Terror.

So strong is this ability of nouns to evoke meaning that we can even take three or four of them, put them in order, and thereby suggest a complete sentence, without any other parts of speech. Consider this: snow, car, shovel. Or this: dress, party, admiration. Can you hear the idea inside each of these not-quite sentences?

The Power of Names

The power of nouns is the power to call things into being by naming them. As I noted earlier, you can see this power in creation myths from many cultures, where things come into being because someone names them. Nouns, more than any other part of speech, connect words to the richness of the world. “Naming,” says author and writing teacher Frances Mayes, “is one of the great involvements of the writer, the bonding of words as close to the subject as possible.”2…as close to the subject as possible. Frances Mayes, The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems (Harcourt, 2001), p. 28.

If we want to become skilled writers, we need to know how to make use of the power of names.

Practice with Nouns: Internal Collecting

Unpack your word hoard, putting all your attention into collecting only nouns—words that name people, places, or things (tangible or intangible). As you do this, you may want to try being aware of whether the words you are collecting are general or specific, abstract or concrete; you can, if you like, collect many different names for the same thing or idea. Keep your pen moving for five or ten minutes, and see what happens.

When you’re done with this practice, take a moment to reflect on paper about what you noticed as you collected nouns. Then read through your list and mark the words you particularly like. Look up their meanings in the dictionary, if you need to. Then use some of those words to construct sentences. Read your sentences out loud. What do you notice?

Now try this: Pick a noun, then collect all the nouns you can think of that you associate with this noun. Select some of these nouns and use them to make sentences. What do you notice this time?

Perhaps in doing these practices you noticed that you don’t know the names of many things in the world around you. Many people in my workshops have that experience. Most of us, these days, are sadly out of touch with the physical world that exists outside our own heads. Thanks to the mass media, we may know the name of every song recorded by our favorite pop singer, but we don’t know the names of the streets we walk on, or the names of the materials used to build the houses lining those streets, or the names of the different kinds of clouds above them. If, then, we ever want to create a picture of a world for our readers, we will have a difficult time doing it.

Fortunately, we can easily add to our store of nouns, just by choosing to learn the names of things. For instance, I used to wander around being vaguely aware of trees, but I didn’t know the names of any of them. Then I decided to learn their names, with the help of a friend and some guidebooks. In the process I acquired much more than some new nouns: Because I could name the trees around me—That’s a maple, that’s an oak—my experience of trees changed completely. To learn the name of a stranger makes her real to us in a new way. No longer is she a nameless face but Jane O’Donnell or Martha Greene, a particular individual. In the same way, trees became more real to me, more alive, because I learned their names. To name something precisely is a step towards knowing it.

Practice with Nouns: External Collecting

If you want to undertake a similar journey into learning the names of things, you can do so easily. Field guides to animals, birds, clouds, rocks, architecture, and many other subjects are readily available. Or perhaps you have a friend who shares your interest in a subject and can tell you the names of things in that field. As you converse with your friend, or browse in a field guide, every time you come across a noun you like, write it down in your notebook, along with its definition, and then use it in sentences to make it your own.

You can find lots of similar ways to add nouns to your word hoard via external collecting. As you read, collect the nouns you like. As you listen to people talk (in person, on the radio, on television), names will come to you that attract your attention. If you write them down and use them, they will become yours.

Understanding Nouns: Kinds of Nouns

Nouns can be classified into four categories: common nouns, proper nouns, compound nouns, and collective nouns. Exploring each category in turn can provide you with more naming words for your word hoard.

1. Common nouns—sometimes called “generic” nouns—name people, places, things, conditions, ideas, and so on. We can recognize common nouns because they are not capitalized (except when they come at the beginning of a sentence). Dog, lake, earth, attitude, sensitivity are all common nouns. Common nouns can be general or specific, abstract or concrete.
2. Proper nouns name a specific person or place or thing: not just any man, but Mr. Satterthwaite; not just any lake, but Lake Champlain; not just any kind of soft drink, but Coke. We can recognize proper nouns easily because they are always capitalized, even when they don’t begin a sentence.
3. Compound nouns are made up of two or more nouns that together name one thing, person, or place. Football game, rock star, book report are examples of compound nouns. Some compound nouns are hyphenated: movie-goer, attention-grabber.
4. Collective nouns name groups of things or people or places. When we talk about a bunch of flowers, a herd of cows, or a crowd of people, the words bunch, herd, and crowd are collective nouns.

Practice with Nouns: Kinds of Nouns

For each kind of noun in turn, first collect as many as you can, then go back through your list and read over your words. Notice the particular power each word has. Then mark the ones you like, and make them your own by putting them into sentences.

1. Collect Common Nouns

Don’t try to be fancy here: Any old common nouns will do. If you’re stuck at first, try looking around you and writing down the names of everything you can observe. Here are some more examples of common nouns:

2. Collect Proper Nouns

You can collect names you already know, or make some up. Think about places or people you know, or that you’d like to know: What are their names or their nicknames?

3. Collect Compound Nouns

First collect ones you know. Then make some up. Here are some more examples:

Sometimes a compound noun is two nouns joined together, without space or punctuation (rooftop); sometimes a compound noun is two nouns, separated by a space, that function as one word (garbage collector); sometimes a compound noun is hyphenated (six-pack). And sometimes other parts of speech can find their way into a compound noun (softball, breakfast, merry-go-round).

4. Collect Collective Nouns

There’s a wonderful book called An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton, that describes the vogue for collective nouns in the Middle Ages and gives examples (with pictures). You may want to take a look at it if you like collective nouns.

If you want to play with collective nouns, try the following game. Collect nouns: some concrete, some abstract; some singular, some plural. Then use them in the collective noun construction: A (or an) ________ (singular) of ________ (plural).

For example:

• an arrogance of academics
• an abstract of philosophers
• a comfort of chairs
• a monstrosity of modern paintings

Let your word mind play; don’t censor what you come up with. This is a great practice for getting used to letting your word mind take over.

Here’s an example of both compound and collective nouns from a professional writer, the beginning of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s retelling of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”:

Practice with Nouns: Make Sentences with Nouns

Select some nouns from your lists and put them together into sentences. Experiment with using different kinds of nouns in one sentence. Afterwards, read your sentences out loud. How do those nouns sound to you?

Practice with Nouns: Freewriting with Nouns

Do some freewriting, making complete sentences, and keep your word mind focused on nouns. Afterwards read your sentences out loud. How do they sound to you?

Practice with Nouns: Read for Nouns

As you read, pay most attention to nouns. Does your author use a lot of nouns? What kind? What is the effect of these nouns?

Understanding Nouns: The Noun-Based Style

Some writers choose to write sentences composed primarily of nouns; we can say that their writing style is a noun-based style. Here’s an example from The Crofter and the Laird, a book by John McPhee about Colonsay, an island off the coast of Scotland. As you read, take mental note of the nouns he uses.

Here are more examples of noun-based style:

Do you like this kind of writing? Then try it for yourself, putting to work your newfound understanding of nouns. Pick a subject and compose some sentences on it, concentrating on using mostly nouns. Or take a passage from something you’ve already written, and revise it so that nouns predominate in most of the sentences. Read your sentences out loud. What do you notice?

Perhaps you will fall in love with the power of nouns, with their amazing ability to call things into being in our minds. You may discover that when you choose nouns that are concrete and specific—when you find the exact name you need—you can often eliminate unnecessary adjectives.

Content Parts of Speech 2: Verbs

A verb is a word that makes things happen. Nouns are the building blocks of sentences, but, used alone, they are static. They can evoke pictures or concepts in a reader’s mind, and so they have lots of power, but those pictures can’t move. Try saying these words out loud, one at a time, and see what happens: snow, justice, crayon.

Now try this exercise again, with verbs added. Notice the difference in the pictures or ideas that come to your mind.

Now the pictures and ideas have some movement to them. The word taking the role of verb in each of these examples—fell, failed, broke—makes that movement happen.

Some writers believe nouns are more powerful than verbs; others believe the reverse. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, said, “All fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move.”) As you experiment with these two parts of speech, you’ll get to make your own decision. Just remember that these two parts of speech do very different things, and each has its own particular kind of power. When a word takes the role of a verb, its power is to assert something or to convey action, to make things happen.

Some of you may be thinking, But what about verbs like is or seemed? They don’t make much of anything happen.

You’re right. They don’t. When it comes to conveying action, all verbs are not created equal. But before we explore the differences among verbs, let’s play a bit with this particular part of speech.

Practice with Verbs: Internal Collecting

As you did with nouns, now collect any verbs that come to you as you keep your pen moving across the page. Use any form of the verb that comes most easily to you: going, goes, go, to go, and so on. (If you get stuck, repeat the same word over and over until your mind gives you another one.)

What did you notice as you did this?

Now make some of these verbs your own by using them to construct sentences. As a variation of this practice, select some nouns from your noun lists and some verbs from the list you just made. Now play with these by using them to make short sentences. (Add any other words you need to make complete sentences, but try to keep the sentences reasonably short.) Use any tense or form of the verb you like. Experiment with combining nouns and verbs that you have never before put together. You might, for instance, try putting abstract nouns with verbs that evoke physical action. (When I did this, I got sentences like, “Hope hypnotizes us,” and “Solitude stills the heart.”)

What happened as you did this exercise?

Read your sentences out loud. How do they sound to you?

Understanding Verbs: Kinds of Verbs

Now that you’re getting a feel for verbs, let’s look more closely at this part of speech. Verbs fall into four main categories, depending on the kind of action they convey.

1. The be verbs: This includes all the forms of the verb to be. This verb conveys little action, and so some contemporary writers on style advise writers to do away with it altogether. But without this verb, our writing would be impoverished, for it enables us to express the condition of things: Joe is sad. Mary is late. In the hands of a skilled writer, the be verb directs our attention to nouns and adjectives. For instance:

2. The linking verbs: Verbs in this category—become, seem, appear, look, grow, remain, feel, and others—have more oomph, more energy to them than the be verb, though the degree of action they convey is still low. As their name implies, they serve to link one thing to another: Joe seems sad. Mary appears happy. Because these verbs don’t have a lot of power themselves, sentences in which they appear must rely on other parts of speech for their energy. For example:

3. The intransitive verbs: When we think of verbs, most likely the ones that come to our minds first will be the intransitives: walk, run, skip, talk, and so on. Verbs in this category do indeed possess energy—lots of it: Joe yelled. Mary laughed. The bowl shattered. Intransitive verbs can be recognized by their defining characteristic: The action they convey is complete in itself and requires no other words. When you want to add more verbs to your word hoard, simple intransitives are a good place to start. Here are a few examples:

4. The transitive verbs: Verbs in this category also convey action—so much so, in fact, that the action expressed by a transitive verb can only be completed by adding another word or group of words to the verb. When, in reading, we come to the end of a group of words like John threw or Mary bought, we feel a sense of incompleteness. We want to know What did John throw? What did Mary buy? The action of each verb must be carried over into another word or group of words (known as the direct object). For instance: John threw the ball. Mary bought a new sweater. Here are more examples:

Many verbs in English can be either transitive or intransitive; these verbs have both kinds of power, depending on how they are used. For example:

Your dictionary will tell you whether a given verb is transitive, intransitive, or both.

Practice with Verbs: The Kinds of Verbs

To know these four different kinds of verbs—not intellectually, but deep in your writer’s bones—will give you the ability to make your writing move. Practice, with awareness, will help you develop this ability. Here are some practices to try:

1. Take the be verb and make sentences with it. What do you notice about these sentences?
2. Do the same thing with linking verbs.
3. Collect intransitive verbs. Choose some and make sentences with them.
4. Do the same thing with transitive verbs.
5. Take some time to read your sentences out loud and to notice how they sound to you.
6. Write a sentence using one kind of verb, then rewrite it using a different kind. Read the versions out loud and notice how they sound. Which do you prefer?
7. Take a passage from something you’ve written, and mark all the verbs. Label each verb with the name of the category it belongs to. Rewrite the passage using verbs that convey more action.

If you do these practices on a regular basis, you will quickly gain command of the four kinds of verbs. Then, as you write and revise, you’ll be more aware of your available choices. With more possibilities to choose from, you will have an easier time writing sentences whose power comes from their verbs.

When you use a verb, it’s helpful to know what category it belongs to. To make use of an is or a seems is not always bad, as some writers on style maintain. The question—the crucial question—is this: Which kind of verb will best serve your sentence?

Perhaps, though, you find yourself struggling to come up with intransitive and transitive verbs. Here are some games to play that will help add some of these powerful verbs to your word hoard.

Practice with Verbs: The Power of Verbs

Begin by collecting any verbs that occur to you. Now read through your list, listening for the verbs that seem to you to have the most power. Mark those verbs, and see if you can figure out what it is that gives them their power. Now see if you can collect more verbs that have that kind of power. If you get stuck, you may want to try some external collecting by browsing through a dictionary or thesaurus.

Practice with Verbs: “Body” Verbs

Bring your attention to your body, as you freewrite to collect verbs. Let your mind range over your body and collect verbs from different parts of it and from actions performed by those parts. Try to feel the action in your body. For example:

Now bring your attention to your senses. Collect verbs that express things the senses do.

Select some verbs from your lists and use them to make sentences.

Practice with Verbs: Verbs with Concrete Nouns

Pick a concrete noun—a thing or a person. What are some things it can do? Try to sense the action physically. Collect the verbs that express those actions. Keep bringing your attention back to your chosen object or person or animal. Keep picturing it. What does it do? For example:

Now make sentences, not necessarily about your chosen noun, using these verbs.

Practice with Verbs: Verbs with Abstract Nouns

Bring your attention to your mind. Collect verbs that express things that the mind does, without going through the senses. For example:

What’s the difference between verbs like these and the verbs you collected in the previous practices? Experiment with making sentences using some of these verbs.

Practice with Verbs: Verbs and Emotions

Bring your attention to your heart and emotions. List some emotions. Pick one. Collect the verbs that go with that emotion. For example:

If you get stuck, try using a thesaurus or a dictionary. Then, once again, select some of these verbs and use them in sentences. How do these sound to you?

Practice with Verbs: Free Play

Make a list of nouns (or select nouns from previous lists). Make a list of verbs. Play with combining nouns and verbs into short sentences. Let your word mind experiment: What would happen if I tried THIS? No one will be grading your experiments, and if you don’t let yourself make them, you’ll never know whether a certain combination of noun and verb might in fact work.

All these games will build the flexibility and inventiveness of your word mind. Then, as you write and revise, you will be able to ask yourself, What effect do I want to create in this sentence? What verb will help me do that?

Understanding Verbs: Verbs and Time

In addition to conveying action, to one degree or another, the main verb in a sentence also tells readers when that action takes place: in the present, the past, or the future.

The way verbs indicate present, past, or future is with tense. Verbs reveal tense by the particular form they take. Any native speaker has already mastered these forms, and knows, without thinking about it, that Joe laughs indicates an action that is happening now, in the present; that Joe laughed, with the added -ed, indicates that Joe’s burst of laughter happened in the past; and that Joe will laugh tells us that sometime in the future Joe will start laughing.

Many of the verbs we use in English follow this regular pattern of changed form. Some don’t: They are called irregular verbs.

The three tenses—present, past, and future—are known as the primary tenses.

These primary tenses can often be replaced by progressive tenses:

There also exist in English what are called the perfect tenses:

We can, if we need to, combine the progressive and perfect forms of a verb to create the progressive perfect tenses:

Any good grammar book will help you review the tense of verbs, should you need to do that.

Understanding Verbs: Verbs and Pace

Since verbs convey action, they make a contribution to the pace of a sentence; that is, to the feeling of energy or activity it conveys to readers. One simple way to intensify the energy of a sentence is to repeat this part of speech; that is, to make use of more than one dynamic verb.

Understanding Verbs: Verb-Based Style

When a writer loads his sentences with verbs, the resulting passage can be said to exhibit a verb-based style. Here are some examples:

Practice: Verb-Based Style

Do you like this kind of writing? Then try it for yourself, putting to work your newfound collection of verbs. Pick a subject and compose some sentences on it, concentrating on using mostly verbs. Or take a passage from something you’ve already written, and revise it so that verbs predominate in most of the sentences. Read your sentences out loud. What do you notice?

Content Parts of Speech 3: Adjectives

Grammarians tell us that when a word takes the role of an adjective, its function is to modify a noun. In other words, an adjective tells us more about the noun it modifies. It makes the noun more specific by giving to it particular qualities. That’s the power of adjectives.

Adjectives help “dress” nouns. If you like, you can imagine an adjective as similar to an actor’s props or costume, which help him play his role better. A villain, for instance, might be wearing a black coat and hat and carrying a cane that hides a knife. Adjectives can add to the power of a noun by making it more specific.

Listen to the difference in these sentences:

Adjectives add information to nouns, but they can be removed from a sentence, and the sentence will still make sense. If we remove the adjectives from the second versions of the sentence examples above, we still have complete sentences.

Practice with Adjectives: Internal Collecting

Let’s begin our exploration of adjectives by collecting some, as we did with nouns and verbs. Keeping your pen moving across the page, bring adjectives out of your word hoard, ignoring other parts of speech. If you’re not sure whether a word is an adjective or not, put it down anyway. (Then, later, look up the word in your dictionary.)

At the end of five or ten minutes, take a moment to reflect on what you noticed as you did this. Then read over your words, preferably out loud, and mark the ones you like. What do you notice about this group of words?

Probably you will find that when you say an adjective out loud and notice what happens in your mind, what you notice is that the adjective brings a noun along with it. The adjective bright might bring a picture of the sun; the adjective happy might bring a picture of a child at play. You are getting a demonstration of the linguistic reality that, to do their work, adjectives need nouns.

Practice with Adjectives: Adjectives and Nouns

Take some of the adjectives you marked in the last exercise, and put each one into a sentence. Notice what happens as you do this. Read your sentences out loud, and, if you like, reflect on what you are learning so far.

The Power of Adjectives

An adjective doesn’t have the same power as a noun. It doesn’t bring some person, place, or thing into existence in our minds in the same way a noun does. Nonetheless, adjectives have their own particular power, which skilled writers know how to use.

The power of adjectives is that they add something to nouns, making those nouns clearer or more specific or more precise. The writer Shirley Jackson has called adjectives (along with adverbs) “coloring words.” Jackson tells apprentice writers that coloring words “must be used where they will do the most good.” She reminds us that “not every action needs a qualifying adverb, not every object needs a qualifying adjective.” Remember, she warns us:

Jackson’s advice reminds us that adjectives have to add something to the nouns they modify; they have to make the noun more vivid, more precise, more powerful. To tell your readers, for instance, that flowers in a garden were “pretty” is unnecessary; the word pretty adds nothing to the noun flowers because flowers are almost always pretty. Then, too, the adjective pretty is a general one, which won’t add more detail to your readers’ picture of the flowers.

To be effective, adjectives need to be carefully chosen. This doesn’t mean that we must rack our brains (or our thesauruses) for polysyllables; it means that we need to understand the effect we want our adjectives to have and choose them accordingly.

Even one well-chosen adjective can “color” a noun. Take a simple sentence like The hitter took a swing at the ball. Now read the following sentences and notice the effect each one has:

What do you notice? The effect of each sentence is slightly different because the adjective before hitter is different. Each adjective adds a slightly different quality or “color” to the noun. It doesn’t change the noun’s basic meaning; it adds to it. (Sometimes adjectives also limit.)

Many people have been taught that using adjectives in writing is “wrong”; often writing teachers declare that good prose relies entirely on nouns and verbs. Such advice ignores the very real power that adjectives possess. While nouns and verbs provide the skeleton of sentences, it is often the adjective or adverb that “carries the news of the sentence,” that moves the prose forward. One writer on style even says, “The modifier is the essential part of any sentence.”4…the essential part of any sentence. John Erskine, “The Craft of Writing,” quoted by Francis Christensen and Bonniejean Christensen in A New Rhetoric (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 7. If you’ve never thought about adjectives in this way, you may want to do more practices using them.

Practice with Adjectives: Coloring

Write a few short sentences without any adjectives. Pick one that you like. Now write it over several times, adding different adjectives to the same noun. Make sure that each adjective you use adds some “news” to the sentence. Read your sentences over, out loud. What do you notice?

If you find this practice difficult, that may be because, like so many of us, you tend to make use only of adjectives that express a judgment: great, awful, fabulous, and so on—adjectives that are general and abstract. To use adjectives to add color to nouns, we need instead to choose adjectives that are specific and concrete.

Try collecting specific and concrete adjectives, and then do the “coloring” practice again.

Practice with Adjectives: External Collecting

As you read, notice adjectives and adjective-noun combinations that appeal to you. Collect them in your notebook and try them out in sentences of your own.

Pay special attention to those sentences where the writer has chosen an adjective that is exactly right for its purpose. For instance:

Practice with Adjectives: Adjective-Noun Combinations

Another way to increase the power of your adjectives is to recognize, and avoid, generic adjective-noun combinations. Beautiful flowers, restful sleep, delicious food: such combinations are so familiar that they barely register in our minds. Here’s a practice that will train you to look beyond the predictable when you add adjectives to nouns.

Make a list of nouns. Make a list of adjectives. Go back through each list and mark the words you like. Then pair adjectives and nouns in sentences, letting yourself experiment with different combinations of these parts of speech. Try making combinations of abstract and concrete nouns, abstract and concrete adjectives. Later, read your sentences out loud. What do you notice? What does your ear tell you?

Adjectives and adverbs are like seasonings in cooking. Herbs and spices can bring out the flavor of particular ingredients and add certain qualities to a dish. But you have to know how to use them. A pinch of cinnamon, a quarter-teaspoon of cardamom, and you have something delicious. But add too much, or too many spices, and you’ll end up with a tasteless muddle. As Mark Twain once wrote, “When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them—then the rest will be valuable.”

So, how many adjectives can we use in a single sentence? The best way to find out is to read skilled writers, and then to experiment on your own.

Some writers rely only on the one-adjective-per-noun formula. But others know how to use more than one adjective with a single noun, thereby gaining more of the power this part of speech has to offer. Here are some examples:

Understanding Adjectives: Adjective-Based Style

When a writer understands the power of adjectives and is accomplished in their use, he or she may write sentences that display an adjective-based style. For example:

Practice: Adjective-Based Style

Play with writing sentences in which adjectives predominate. Read your sentences aloud. How do they sound to you?

Content Parts of Speech 4: Adverbs

Adverbs do the same work for verbs that adjectives do for nouns: They act as modifiers or “coloring words.” For instance:

The verbs in a sentence present action; the adverbs give additional information about that action: how it was done, or when, or where. Sometimes adverbs can do some additional work, by serving as modifiers for adjectives and other adverbs. Adverbs can’t modify nouns.

Practice with Adverbs: Internal Collecting

Collect some adverbs. (If you’re not sure whether some of your words are actually adverbs, put them down anyway.) Then choose a few from this list, and put them into short sentences. Try words you weren’t sure about. Can you use them in a way that “colors” a verb? (Or another adverb? Or an adjective?) If not, they aren’t adverbs. If you’re still not sure, look up the words in a dictionary.

What do you notice in doing this practice?

Perhaps you notice that many of your adverbs are adjectives with the suffix -ly attached. To build your collection of adverbs, you may want to collect adjectives and see how many of them can become adverbs through the addition of this suffix.

Practice with Adverbs: External Collecting

As with the other parts of speech, you can add more adverbs to your word hoard simply by being on the lookout for them as you read, and as you listen to conversations. When you find adverbs, or adverb-verb combinations you like, write them in your notebook and make them your own by using them in practice sentences.

Practice with Adverbs: Verbs and Adverbs

Skilled writers don’t rely exclusively on well-worn combinations of adverbs and verbs, or adverbs and adjectives. Their well-trained word minds enable them to come up with unusual and telling combinations. For instance:

To get your own word mind out of adverb-verb ruts, try collecting verbs, then collecting adverbs, and then play with putting them together in various ways. See what you can come up with. Then create sentences in which you use some of these combinations.

Understanding Adverbs: Adverb-Based Style

When a passage relies heavily on adverbs for its meaning and effect, we can say that it exhibits an adverb-based style:

Content Parts of Speech 5: When Is a Noun Not a Noun?

Nouns as Adjectives and Adverbs

As you experiment with content parts of speech, collecting nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, you will soon notice that many English words can play more than one role. Nouns, for instance, can sometimes take on the role of adjectives:

Some nouns (certainly not all) can also play the role of adverb. For example:

Practice: Nouns as Adjectives and Adverbs

Collect some concrete nouns. Select some, and use them, as nouns, in sentences. Then see whether you can rewrite the sentences using some of the nouns as adjectives. Read the two versions of each sentence out loud. What do you notice?

If you like this technique, collect examples of its use by skilled writers, and then imitate their sentences. Look, too, for examples of nouns used as adverbs, and practice using them.

Nouns as Verbs

Nouns can also take on the role of verb in sentences. The word moan, for instance, can be a noun; it can also be a verb. The words catch, throw, snow, move, dog, table, egg—and hundreds of other nouns—can also take on the role of verb in sentences. We can write The snow fell all day, or It snowed all day. Such uses of nouns as verbs are so common that words that can play both roles are noted as both nouns and verbs in our dictionaries. Skilled writers know how to make good use of the versatility of such words.

Practice: Nouns as Verbs

Collect some nouns that can also be used as verbs. (Check your dictionary to be sure.) Write pairs of sentences for each word, using it first as a noun, then as a verb.

Try the same practice starting with collecting verbs.

What do you notice?

Practice: Nouns as Verbs

As you read, notice when a writer uses a noun as a verb. What is the effect of concrete nouns used as verbs? Abstract nouns? Collect examples of sentences where nouns are used effectively as verbs.

Many words in English can also take on new roles with the simple addition of a suffix (ending). We’ve already seen that many adverbs are adjectives with an -ly added. (We could also say that many adjectives are adverbs with the -ly ending removed!) We can also create adjectives by adding prefixes or suffixes to nouns and verbs. Many of our common adjectives were formed in this way: beautiful (beauty+ful); happy (happ+y); contemptible (contempt+ible). In the next section we’ll take a look at some other ways we can make use of this ability of English words to play multiple roles.

Before you move to that section, though, I recommend that you make sure you have a solid grasp of the basics of content parts of speech. The material in the next section is more advanced, and if you haven’t acquired, through practice, a good understanding of the basics, you may be confused by what follows.

Content Parts of Speech 6: When Is a Verb Not a Verb?

Like actors in their plays, some words can take on more than one role in sentences; that is, they can “play” more than one part of speech. Verbs are particularly versatile in this respect: When they take certain specified forms, verbs can play the roles of noun, adjective, or adverb. To understand how this happens, we need to revisit the main functions of a verb—to convey the action of a sentence and to indicate tense. When a verb is doing this work—as the word laughed does in the sentence Joe laughed loudly—it is said to be in finite form. (Sometimes a verb doing this work is called a predicate verb.)

Verbs, though, can also find their ways into what grammarians call nonfinite forms; and it is in these forms that they serve, not as the main verb of a sentence, but as nouns or adjectives or adverbs. Verbs in these nonfinite forms are known as verbals—constructions that will quickly expand your options for making sentences.

When is a verb, then, not a verb? When it’s a verbal. And when it’s a verbal, it’s one of four kinds: a present participle; a past participle; a gerund; an infinitive.

Verbals 1: The Present Participle

The present participle is the -ing form of a verb: swimming, walking, giggling are all present participles. We most frequently use the present participle as part of the main verb of a sentence, as in The dog is barking. (When we use a form of be with a present participle we are creating the present progressive tense of the verb.)

That present participle—the word ending in -ing—can also be used as an adjective: The barking dog kept him up all night.

Our vocabulary is filled with present participles acting as adjectives: the flowing water; the driving rain; the shimmering light.

Practice with Verbals: Present Participles

To get familiar with how present participles can be used as adjectives, first collect some verbs in their -ing form. And to make sure you know how to use these participles as part of the main verb of a sentence, try making sentences with the participles in that role. Then try using the participles as adjectives. In some cases you will need to add another word or two so the participle can take this role. For instance:

Verbals 2: The Past Participle

The past participle is the form of a verb that we use to create past tense for the main verb in a sentence: Joe baked the bread for two hours. The right fielder dropped the ball. Often that past participle ends in -ed; many times, though, it does not. Frozen, gave, spent, wrote are examples of past participles that do not end in -ed. Like its sister, the present participle, the past participle can also take on the role of adjective: the baked bread; a dropped football; boiled eggs; frozen food.

Practice with Verbals: Past Participles

Collect some past participles. (You may find it easier to do this by writing some short sentences in the past tense, and then extracting the past participles.) See how many of them can serve as adjectives, and write sentences using them in this way. (Note that not all past and present participles can be used as modifiers.)

What did you notice doing these practices? Were you surprised at how many familiar adjectives are actually present and past participles taking on the role of adjectives? Perhaps you also noticed that using participles in this way lets you get more information into a sentence. Even more important, when we make use of participles and other verbals, we can get the energy of a verb—that feeling of action—into a sentence without having to add extra main verbs. The ability to do this is one of the marks of a highly skilled writer. For example:

Verbals 3: Gerunds

As present participles, in their -ing form, verbs can also play the role of nouns. When they take on this role, they are known as gerunds.

Practice with Verbals: Gerunds

Go back to your list of present participles and select some that can serve as nouns. Try them out in sentences in this role, adding any other words you need.

Verbals 4: Infinitives

When a verb is in its “infinitive” form, it starts with “to.” In this case, the word to is not considered a preposition, but a part of the verb. When a verb is in this form, it can take other roles:

1. as a noun:

2. as an adjective

3. as an adverb:

Practice with Verbals: Infinitives

Collect some infinitives. Try them out in the role of noun, adjective, and adverb.

Practice with Verbals: Reading for Verbals

The best way to learn how to use verbals is to see how the pros do it. As you read your favorite writers, notice the verbals they use. Write down some of their sentences containing verbals, and then imitate their use of past and present participles, gerunds, and infinitives.

Practice with Verbals: Writing with Verbals

Do some freewriting and, as you come up with things to say, try at the same time to concentrate your word mind on using verbals. You may feel, at first, very awkward. Just remember how you felt when you first tried to swing a tennis racket or a baseball bat to hit a ball, or how you felt when you got on a bicycle for the first time. Keep doing this practice, and the ones above, and eventually verbals will be yours to use whenever you wish.

You may also want to revise passages of your writing, seeing where you can use verbals to make your sentences stronger. Don’t forget to test the results by reading your work out loud and listening to how it sounds.

The ability to use verbals well, you’ll find, will vastly expand your options for constructing sentences. Though it may take you a while to feel comfortable with them, once you have added this particular tool to your repertoire, I suspect you’ll be delighted with what it can do for your writing.

A Word About Pronouns

A pronoun is a word that substitutes—or “stands in”—for a noun, like an understudy substituting for a principal actor. Which pronoun would you use to substitute for The boy? The girl? The dogs? Pronouns allow us, among other things, to avoid having to repeat a noun over and over. In so doing, they give us the opportunity to direct our reader’s attention to other information in a sentence.

Most likely, if you are a native English speaker, you have absorbed all you need to know about using pronouns from listening to other people talk and from your reading. If, however, you get confused about whether you should write me or I, or she or her, in a given sentence, I recommend that you spend some time reviewing how pronouns work with the help of a good grammar book.

A Word About Interjections

Grammarians call words like these interjections. My grammar book says interjection is the name for words that “appear intrusively in a sentence and carry some force or charge of feeling.” We use interjections all the time when we speak informally, and they can also be used in writing, especially when we are putting words into the mouths of our characters.

Content Parts of Speech 7: Developing Your Own Style

Some writers on style deplore adjectives and adverbs: Avoid them! they proclaim. Others tell us never to use forms of the verb to be. There are even a few who condemn nouns. Rather than listening to any of these voices, consider this alternative way of using parts of speech: Remember that every content part of speech has its own particular power, and that, if you practice, you can learn to use that power for your own purposes. You can train your word mind to be aware of the possibilities of nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs. And you can train it to make choices among these content parts of speech. The choices you make will help create your own individual voice on the page, your own writing style.

For style is not a matter of diction alone. While the particular words we choose are, naturally, essential to the making of our sentences, the choices we make about how to put those words together is equally important. Do we want, for instance, to write: He walked quickly? Or He walked with a quick step? Or His step quickened? Or even He walked with a quickness that amazed her?

Skilled writers know how to listen not only to the meaning of their words, but also to what those words are doing in sentences. In the moment of composition, the mind of a skilled writer considers possibilities and makes choices among them, just as, at the crack of the bat, the mind of a skilled outfielder considers possible routes to the ball and chooses among them. (Instinct, as well as training, plays a part in this process. And writers have an advantage over athletes: We get to revise our work.) The outfielder relies on years of training, on thousands of catches made in practice, to make the choice that enables him to catch the ball. Writers, too, need to practice their “moves.” If we want to develop skill in putting words together, then we need to practice paying attention to what our words are doing in sentences, as well as to what they mean.

Practice with content parts of speech will wake up a part of your word mind that may have been asleep all your life. And then, when you sit down to write a story, a poem, or an essay, you’ll find you have new fluency in constructing sentences. You’ll be amazed, I suspect, at the things you will be able to do with words, at the new techniques you have for finding just the right words and for putting those words together.

No one can write well without technique, just as no one can play music without what musicians call “chops.” Technique, craft, skill—call it what you like; you must have it to keep your reader’s attention. Parts of speech are one of a writer’s most important tools. And the only way to make these tools your own is to practice using them.

In the next section, we turn from content parts of speech to structural words.

Parts of Speech 2: Structural Words

Along with the four content parts of speech (and the pronouns and interjections) we have considered so far, English also contains another essential group of words. Traditionally, grammarians have considered these as parts of speech; today they are more likely to call them structural words or function words. These are the small—and indispensable—words that let us make connections among content parts of speech: determiners, prepositions, and conjunctions. English contains about two hundred of these words, the most frequently used words in our language.

Though these words are small and unobtrusive—who notices an or the, in or on?—they play essential roles in our language: Most important, they join content words into groups to make sentences. While we can use structural words without thinking about them, understanding what they do takes us one step further towards understanding how to compose sentences.

Structural Words 1: Determiners

Determiners are the words that indicate to readers that a noun is coming up soon in the sentence. (They are also known as indicators.) Determiners in English include: the, an, a (also known as articles); words like these and those (when used before nouns); and numbers used before nouns. Determiners are, to readers, what highway signs are to drivers: Look out! a determiner tells readers, Noun ahead!

You can see how determiners work in sentences like these:

Determiners always come before the noun. It’s important to note that nouns are sometimes not preceded by a determiner, as in these sentences:

Just as a sign for an upcoming exit can be a quarter of a mile or more from the exit itself, so can the determiner be separated from the upcoming noun by one or more other words. Read these sentences slowly, preferably out loud, and see if you can hear, as well as see, the distance from the determiner to its noun.

When we add a determiner to a noun, or to a noun plus one or more adjectives, we create what’s called a noun phrase. A noun phrase, grammarians tell us, is a group of words that “goes together” and that is headed by a noun.

Practice with Determiners: Making Noun Phrases

Experiment with putting nouns together with determiners, then add some adjectives between the two. Read your experiments out loud. How do they sound? Try putting some of them into sentences and read those out loud. What does your ear tell you?

Practice with Determiners: Reading for Noun Phrases

To continue developing your awareness of noun phrases, look for them in sentences by your favorite writers. If you wish, copy one of their sentences and then imitate the structure of the noun phrases in it, using exactly the same number of adjectives between determiner and noun as the writer did.

Structural Words 2: Prepositions

Of. At. To. With. In. These are some of the many words in English that are known as prepositions. Prepositions are words that show a relationship between two or more things and/or people in a sentence. They link the noun, noun phrase, or pronoun that follows the preposition to another word in the sentence, indicating such relationships as location (The cat is on the table.) and direction (The men strolled across the room.) and time (I'll see you after the game.). Native English speakers can use most prepositions without thinking about them.

What are some prepositions you’re familiar with? Take a minute to jot them down.

Here are some of the most common prepositions in English:

Except in rare instances, prepositions never stand alone in a sentence; they always function as part of a group of words, known as a prepositional phrase. We make prepositional phrases like this:

Here are some examples of prepositional phrases:

Prepositional phrases sometimes include an adjective (or two) before the noun. For example:

Prepositional phrases can also combine to make longer phrases: in the dark days/ of winter. (The slash mark indicates the two prepositional phrases that make up the longer one.)

Practice with Prepositions: Making Prepositional Phrases

Collect some nouns and some prepositions, and then combine them into prepositional phrases. Read your phrases out loud. What do you notice?

Then rewrite your phrases adding some adjectives. What do you notice now, when you read these aloud?

Like noun phrases, prepositional phrases are an essential writer’s tool. Take some time to build your facility in making them. Once you feel comfortable constructing prepositional phrases, select some and put them into sentences. Read your sentences out loud. What do you hear?

Practice with Prepositions: Reading for Prepositional Phrases

As you did with other parts of speech, read your favorite authors and notice the prepositional phrases they use. Copy some of these sentences, and imitate the way your chosen writer uses prepositional phrases. Some examples:

Structural Words 3: Conjunctions

Conjunctions are a versatile part of speech: They have several important roles to play. Overall, though, their function is to join one element of a sentence to another element. For now, let’s pay attention only to how conjunctions can join content parts of speech. The conjunctions we use most frequently to perform this task are ones we use all the time: and and but. For example:

Note that when we use conjunctions in this way they must join two parts of speech of the same kind. So we can use these conjunctions to join a noun and a noun, or an adjective and an adjective, but not a noun and a verb, or an adjective and an adverb. (And and but are known as coordinating conjunctions; this particular category of conjunction also includes or, nor, yet, and so, but not all of these can join two parts of speech.)

Note, too, that when we combine two (or more) nouns in this way, we are creating a noun phrase. Two or more verbs joined with a conjunction make a verb phrase. And we can make adjective phrases and adverb phrases in the same way.

Sometimes writers use pairs of conjunctions to join two parts of speech; and/or; either/or; neither/nor; not only … but also:

Practice with Conjunctions: Combine Parts of Speech

Collect some nouns. Then, using and or but, combine selected nouns into noun phrases. Then use some of these noun phrases in sentences. Read these sentences out loud. What do you notice?

Try the same thing with verbs, adjectives, and adverbs in turn.

Practice with Conjunctions: Read for Conjunctions

When you look at the writing of professionals, you will find lots of conjunctions. For now, pay attention only to how conjunctions join two nouns or two verbs (including verbals), two adjectives or two adverbs. Here’s Ian Rankin again:

Although structural words are small, and although they may seem unimportant, they provide writers with a most useful tool: the ability to create phrases. In the next chapter we’ll explore the craft of making and using phrases.

Take Time to Reflect

What have you learned through the practices in this chapter. Do you need to review any techniques before moving on?