Sentence Structure

This week in grammar class we went over sentence structure and its main components. Most specifically we reviewed verbs, adverbs, nouns, adjectives, and articles. These are very important to know because without them you will not be able to identify parts of a sentence. For me this is also very important because this was a part of grammar I didn’t understand in elementary school. I am excited to say that now I understand and I want to share what I’ve learned with you.
Nouns, adverbs, verbs, and adjectives are all part of the open word class. To start we will talk about nouns. Usually a noun is preceded in a sentence by an article, for example when you see “a, the, or an,” you know a noun is coming up next. Another giveaway is when there are numbers or other determiners. Of course you do not always have to have these in front of a noun for it to be a noun. If there are no determiners to give away that you have a noun in the sentence, stick with the fact that nouns are “namers.” Examples would be dog, cat, person, or soda. If words end with ness, tion, and ity, then you know you have a noun. There are also proper nouns that you should look out for which are names for specific people or places and start with a Capital. Now that you know how to find a noun we can move onto verbs which, in my opinion, are the second most important piece of a sentence.
Just like nouns there are a few tricks to determine what words are verbs. Most commonly known is that verbs show action or a state of being. Words that end with “ing” are verbs also when you can be something like: am, is, are, was, and were. That is pretty much all you need to know for verbs. Adjectives are also an easy concept to understand, for the most part. Adjectives are what describe a noun or other parts of the sentence. Common adjectives, to give you an idea, are delicious, sad, broken, and blue. Also adjectives are the words that can answer questions like: which one? How many? Which kind? And whose? When you can answer these questions it usually means you have an adjective. Now you can figure our almost all parts of a sentence, all that’s left is adverbs.
Adverbs are also describing words but in this case describe or modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. Just as adjectives, adverbs answer questions of how, when, where, why, how much, and to what extent. The easiest way to tell these two describers apart is that adverbs end with “ly.” These adverbs are often found near the verbs. To test if the word is truly an adverb check to see if the adverb can move around in the sentence. If so then it is an adverb because adjectives can’t move around in a sentence. These are a few of the tricks I’ve learned so far in determining pieces of a sentence. The best way to learn these 4 words is to practice finding them in sentences. Good Luck!

The question I have this week is whether or not I’m using colons correctly in my writing. I’m not sure when they are appropriate so I would love some feedback. Thanks everyone.