Note 163 – Grammatical building blocks

To recap on yesterday’s blog in Note 162 – Language = Vocabulary + Grammar rules, grammar is the glue that holds the words together to form a language.   Today I am going to analyse a sentence word by word and if this brings up any new information that I haven’t covered before, it will form part of a future post.

According to Graham King in his book Collins Improve your Writing Skills, the parts of speech that form a sentence can be thought of as components or building blocks i.e. adverbs, nouns, adjectives etc.  It would be too easy for me if I just copied the sentence he gave as an example, so I’ve made up my own and will attempt to analyse it.  Comments welcome:

The untidy room was really annoying Samantha.  She called some cleaners for help.

The (determiner)
untidy (adjective)
room (noun)
was (auxilliary verb) 
really (adverb)
annoying (verb)
Samantha (proper noun).  
She (personal pronoun) 
called (verb)
some (determiner)
cleaners (plural noun) 
for (preposition) 
help (noun).

Does anyone have any comments on my analysis?  The only parts of speech that I believe I haven’t covered so far in ‘mywritingnotebook’ blog is ‘auxilliary verbs’ and possibly ‘determiners’.  These will be covered in future posts.

As a side note, my eldest daughter who is six (almost seven) years old, said that wanted to help me with today’s blog.  I usually try and start writing it after they’ve gone to bed, but decided to try something different.  After telling her it was about grammar, she quite confidently said “I can help with that!”.  I read out the sentence that I had made up and she wrote it down.  I then got her to draw an arrow from each word and write down the component names on the page.  I feel that I achieved more than I anticipated with this post today.

This blog post forms part of my writing challenge. Don’t forget that you can subscribe to receive my daily blogs by email so that you don’t miss any. Just click ‘sign me up’ on the home page. Alternatively you can follow my blogs on Twitter  or my ‘Tips and Luxuries‘ Facebook page. Requests for future blogs (punctuation/grammar/writing tips) are always welcome.

Until tomorrow…

Sandra
Freelance writer

For more information on my services as a freelance writer please visit my website www.sandramadeira.com

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My Tips and Luxuries website 
(includes the introduction to my upcoming book ‘A Gift for Stressed and Busy Parents’)

Twitter: @madeirasandra and @tipsandluxuries

Reference list:

Graham King in his book Collins Improve your Writing Skills, UK

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• Note 162 – Language = Vocabulary + Grammar rules (mywritingnotebook.wordpress.com)
• what we are thought……………… (hasttisaeeed.wordpress.com)