Are you excited about writing, but worried about your writing abilities? You’re not alone in your fear. After an English bachelor’s degree and nine years of working as a writer and editor, I still doubt whether or not I can write well enough to communicate my ideas. It’s common to get scared of approaching the blank page, but learning the rules of grammar and story can help calm those fears. Intentionally building our skills, even by reviewing things we’ve known for a long time, has a huge impact on our confidence.
I know you’re probably especially curious to learn about commas—trust me, they baffle even the most experienced editors. However, before we jump straight into punctuation, you have to learn the ins and outs of a sentence. Parts of speech and types of phrases are the building blocks of a good sentence. What does each type of word or phrase do, and how can you use those to effectively communicate your message or story?
Parts of Speech
The term “parts of speech” is a fancy way of saying “different word categories.” The most basic sentences simply use nouns and verbs. Examples:
Sarah ate dinner.
Matthew ran.
Listen, man!
To write more complicated sentences, we use seven other parts of speech. Sometimes, we need a lot of words to say what we need to say, and sometimes, we only need a few.
We’ll start by going through a quick rundown of each word type, and then over the next several weeks, I’ll go through each one in their own individual post.
Nouns
A person, place, thing, or idea. Essentially, if you’re naming something tangible, like a flower, a person, a car, a country, or a lion, that word is always going to be a noun. Even names, such as Tabitha or England, are also nouns.
Verbs
Verbs are words that describe an action or a state of being. These are the words that give your sentence movement, that tell your reader what your character is doing. Examples include, run, sing, eat, play, break, etc.
Adjectives
These are words that give nouns a more specific meaning or description. This includes words for color (red), temperature (cold), size (skinny), emotion (sad), smell (stinky), taste (bitter), texture (soft), and volume (loud), among a myriad of other things. Be careful how often you use these so you don’t soften your sentences too much (more on this in the adjective specific post).
Adverb
Adverbs are similar to adjectives, except they help to define verbs instead of nouns. They include words that explain how (quickly), when (earlier), where (inside), how often (frequently), and to what extent a verb is being done. For example, you can show that someone’s not so good at running by saying, “Jared runs clumsily.” Similar to adjectives, it is often better to use these only when necessary, which I’ll expand on in the post on adverbs.
Pronouns
These are words used to replace a noun, usually used when the noun has already been referred to. We use these constantly in conversation. They make it easier to refer to people, things, or ideas without constantly using the noun for them over and over again, such as I, we, me, us, she, he, they, who, which.
Conjunctions
When you need to show that two parts of a sentence are closely connected, you use a conjunction. Conjunctions can also define how those sentence sections are connected. Is one explaining the other? Maybe use “because.” Is one adding more detail to the other? Maybe you need “and.” Is one contradicting the other slightly? You could use “however” or “but.” Other conjunctions include words like yet, if, although, before, since, whether.
Interjections
Interjections are most often used in dialogue as a character expresses their excitement, fear, worry, or other large emotions. These usually stand alone, but they can also start a sentence. Examples include, “Oh dear! Holy cow! Hooray! Alas! Dear god!”
Prepositions
Similar to conjunctions, prepositions are a kind of connector word that often describes the position of a person, place, or thing. When you’re wanting to express where something is or its connection to something else, you’ll use a preposition. For example, “Sydney lives around the block” or “Harry read the plays of Shakespeare.” There are 150 different prepositions, so they can get a little confusing, but here are some other common ones: in, to, from, with, for, at, by, after, across, near, onto, without, etc.
Articles
Articles are pretty simple. We only have three: the, a, and an. Simply stated, these tiny words are used before nouns to determine whether or not the noun is specific or general: the cat or a cat. Those little words completely change how we interpret what’s being said. “The cat” immediately brings to mind one specific cat, while “a cat” implies a general or unknown cat.
All of these parts of speech are a bit more complex, but there’s only so much room in your brain for all this information. I will elaborate on these more fully in blog posts in the future, but for now you’ve got the basics!
