Grammar lesson 1 on preliminaries

PRELIMINARIES

DICTION/ADDRESS

A writer of a formal or professional document in business, scientific or technical writing will not address the reader directly nor refer to himself/herself.

In other words, the writer will not speak person-to-person to the reader, like, “Hey, did you ever wonder what causes acid rain? Well, I am going to tell you.” The writer will say, “Acid rain has certain typical causes.”

There are two reasons for this.

• First, it is a tradition that is followed to make the writing sound more official.
• Second, it avoids many of the grammatical errors that happen when people address the reader directly or refer to themselves.

Example:  

Instead of saying “When you go to the store, you…” say “When people go to the store, they…” because this will prevent certain kinds of pronoun mismatches later in the sentence or paragraph.

Example:

Instead of saying “I think that the author is correct,” say, “The author is correct.” This prevents many of the useless filler phrases like “in my opinion” or “I believe.”

If you are having trouble knowing whether you are referring to yourself or addressing the reader, there is an easy way to be sure to avoid it. Simply do not use any of these words: I me my mine myself you your yours yourself we us ourselves

Four Rules of Writing about What an Author Said

1. When discussing an author’s work, refer to the author by both names or last name only. In other words, “According to Stephen King…” or “According to King…” NOT “According to Stephen.”
2. Use present tense verbs, no matter when the material was actually written. In other words, “Shakespeare says…” NOT “Shakespeare said…”
3. Avoid messy phrasing like “In the article it says…” or “In King’s article he says…” There are grammatical reasons to avoid this that will be discussed later. For now, just remember to say simply “King says…” or “The article says…”
4. There are many other phrases that mean the same as “according to” and “says,” so try to use a variety of them.

TEXTS AND PHRASES

• Two helpful terms are TEXT and PHRASE.
  • “Text” does not only mean a textbook. A text is any piece of writing. A shopping list, some graffiti on a wall, and the words on a road sign are all texts.
  • A phrase is a group of words. It may or may not be a complete sentence; it may or may not make sense.
    • Example: When the detective picked up the ransom note, she saw that there were many phrases within the text that were spelled incorrectly or had faulty grammar.

SUBJECTS AND VERBS

• Even though this class will not cover parts of speech, it will still be helpful for everyone to know how to find the subject and the verb in a sentence, because those terms will be used in future lessons.
• Children are taught that the subject of a sentence is what the sentence is mainly about. This definition is not helpful for anyone trying to find the subject of a complicated sentence.
• A better way to find the subject of a sentence is to find the verb first. The verb is the action word. Most people can find that easily.
• The subject of the sentence is whoever or whatever is doing the verb.
• What if there is more than one verb in a sentence?
  • Keep in mind that the most common sentence pattern in the English language is

Subject verb [everything else].

• (This fact will pop up many times over the semester.)
• Therefore, if that is the most common sentence pattern, then statistically, the odds are good that the main subject and verb are the ones closest to the front of the sentence.