13 What is Grammar?

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

“Why?” asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit.

The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. “Well, I’m a panda,” he says. “Look it up.”

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

(From Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynn Truss)

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Following are useful chapters that review English grammar, including the parts of speech, with extended definitions and examples. These grammar chapters are adapted from 1, 2, 3 Write! by Gay Monteverde and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

There are two ways to be a more correct writer:

• read a lot
• study grammar

If you read lots of books as a child and continued to read over the years, chances are your writing is already correct.  Why?  Because your brain absorbed the structures and systems we call “standard English usage” as you read.  You may not be able to recite the rules, but you use them correctly when you write.

If that didn’t happen, you probably struggle with writing to some extent.  But it is never too late!  Reading as an adult will automatically help you write more correctly.  In the meantime, you can learn to avoid common mistakes by studying grammar.

Why does writing correctly matter?  Well, writing correctly is part of how students are graded in every class that involves writing (and that is most classes).  But writing correctly is also important after college.

Writers who want to write more correctly need to study grammar so they can consciously make correct choices.  Does it take work?  Yes.  But like every challenge in life, this one won’t get better until you deal with it.  The information in this chapter will get you closer to the kind of writing you want to be able to do.

The “8 Parts of Speech”

“Parts of speech” is the system we use to explain how to build sentences–which word goes where, why, and in what form.

Even if you struggle with writing, your brain already has a pretty good grasp of how this system works.  For example, you know there is something wrong with this sentence:

I love dog my.

If I asked you to explain the problem, I doubt you would say, “The possessive pronoun ‘my’ is being used as an adjective here, to show who owns the dog, and in English, adjectives usually come before the noun they modify.”  But you’ve heard enough correct examples that your brain automatically sees the problem.  The sentence should be:  I love my dog.

Can you spot the more subtle errors in the following sentences?

• The two best things about the party was the music and the food.  (Error: subject/verb agreement. The verb “was” does not agree with the subject “things.”  It should be “were.”)
• Natalie found a sparkly girl’s bracelet on the sidewalk.  (Error:  misplaced modifier.  It’s not a sparkly girl, it’s a sparkly bracelet.)
• When John’s dog came back, he was so happy.  (Error: unclear pronoun reference.  Who was happy?  The dog or John?)

The label “part of speech” refers to what job a word is doing in a sentence.  There are eight parts of speech in English.  In other words, there are eight possible jobs.  Here is a list, with brief job descriptions:

1. noun: names a person, place, thing, or idea
2. pronoun: used in place of a noun to avoid repetition
3. adjective: modifies a noun or pronoun
4. verb: shows action, links subjects with words that describe them, or helps other verbs do those things
5. adverb: modifies verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs
6. preposition: shows the position of something or someone in space and time
7. conjunction: connects words, phrases, or clauses
8. interjection: shows surprise or emotion

You can review the eight parts of speech, punctuation, and sentence structure by using the Khan Academy videos and exercises. These are free resources.

• Grammar videos from Khan Academy

In the following chapters, we will study these eight parts of speech, one at a time and in depth.