When we start studying parts of speech, the most important types of words to understand are nouns and verbs.
Nouns are names for people, places, and things, and verbs are action words that tell us what those nouns are doing or how they are connected. Without verbs, nouns would just be lonely lists of objects, and without nouns, verbs would just be lists of actions with nothing in particular doing those actions. At its most basic level, a sentence is defined by whether or not it has both a noun and a verb. All other words are extra.
Writers who are more sparse, like Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver, often pare down their prose to mostly nouns and verbs to make their sentences stronger and more clear. If you want to have strong prose skills, then learning the rules of nouns and verbs is your first step.
Nouns
Nouns make up a significant amount of our speech. There are tens of thousands of nouns in the English language. The four most common types of nouns are common nouns, proper nouns, collective nouns, and abstract nouns. Let’s get into it!
Common nouns: the term used for basic tangible objects, such as strawberry, horse, lamp, book, or tree. This is one of the most common kinds of words—even the word “word” is a common noun!
Proper nouns: the name of a place, person, or thing, such as Eiffel Tower, Adam, Italy.
Collective nouns: the name of a group, such as team, orchestra, herd, or forest. These words allow you to refer to a large group in a way that connects the individual parts of that group more closely than just using the plural form of those words, like athletes, musicians, sheep, or trees.
Abstract nouns: the name of something that can neither be seen nor touched, such as joy, wisdom, courage, or love. These can be a bit more difficult to identify, but abstract nouns are essentially intangible things like emotions or moral qualities.
Verbs
There are a lot of categories for verbs, too many to get to in one blog post. But these are the most common that you probably already use every day: action verbs, stative verbs, and helping verbs.
Action verbs: an action, like swim, slump, run, play, etc. You’ve probably used multiple of these words in your regular speech today without even noticing it.
State of being verbs (also known as a linking verb): does not describe an action, but instead describes the current, past, or future state of being of the subject in your sentence. There are eight linking verbs: is, was, were, am, are, be, being, been. Some examples of how they’re used in a sentence include:
That movie was scary!
Stephen is hungry.
I am an engineer.
A linking verb usually stands between two nouns or a noun and an adjective, giving them meaning in relation to one another.
Helping verbs: support other verbs, often by defining when the verb happened.
Chris is running to the store for some milk.
The horse should go to the vet tomorrow.
I must turn the heater up, or else I might freeze tonight.
If you’re confused about the difference between linking and helping verbs, don’t worry. Even I get mixed up sometimes. The confusion often comes from the fact that all eight linking verbs can also be used as helping verbs, and helping verbs are often used to support a linking verb, such as:
I will be tired tonight. (will=helping, be=linking)
Essentially, a linking verb is defining the noun, while a helping verb is defining another verb.
Hopefully, you understand nouns and verbs a little better than you did before you read this. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out! I know this is a lot of information to be learning on your own.
Next time, we’ll get into adjectives and adverbs, some of the most despised words of all. And we’ll talk about how to use them without getting too purple with your prose.
