Gruesday--Personal Pronouns

Hi everyone, I hope you all had a marvelous Christmas. I know I did. Here in North Texas we had a White Christmas, which is something I’ve never experienced before, so it was definitely nice and my son was very excited about it. But now that Christmas is over it’s time to get back to that Gruesome Grammar! Today (instead of Gruesday) I am having Grrrsday…? Lol… maybe I will just stick with Gruesday. Next week will go back to normal schedule and Gruesday will go back to it's regular day of the week--Tuesday.

This week I am exploring personal pronouns.

Personal Pronouns represent specific people or things . How they are used depends on:

-number-singular(I) or plural(we)

-person- 1^st person (I), 2^nd person (you), 3^rd person (he)

-gender- female(she), male(he), neutral(we)

-case-object(us), subject(we)

As we already know from last week’s post--pronouns take the place of a noun and sometimes another pronoun.

I found a chart similar to this one online and recreated since I found it to be very helpful.

number	person	gender	Personal pronouns
			subject	object
singular	1st	male/female	I	me
	2nd	male/female	you	you
	3rd	male	he	him
		female	she	her
		neutral	it	it
plural	1st	Male/female	we	us
	2nd	Male/female	you	you
	3rd	Male/female/neutral	they	them

Here are some examples of how these personal pronouns are used in a sentence: (The first sentence shows subject pronoun and second, object pronoun)

-I like the movie.

-He told me he loves me.

-Do you like Finding Nemo?

-I don’t understand you.

-He looked at the dog.

-He looked at him.

-What is she doing?

-The cat was her animal.

-It doesn't work.

-Where is it?

-Do you need four eggs or five?

-Did Allie and AJ buy you a Christmas present?

-They watched a movie.

-Candy and Prince went home with them.

I hope this post was helpful. Check back this coming Tuesday for a look at Possessive Pronouns. :-)

Gruesday--Intro to the Pesky Pronoun

Welcome to week three of Gruesome Grammar Tuesday!

In this week’s Gruesday post I am going to be discussing the pronoun. In fact I am going to split this post up, because—believe or not—the pronoun is more complicated and pesky than even those nosy nouns. So this week I am just going to talk about the basic definitions of the pronoun and describe how it is used in most instances.

What is a pronoun?

-          Pronouns are used in place of nouns (or sometimes another pronoun) to avoid repetition and make sentences easier to understand.

o   Ex.—The mother told the mother’s daughter that the mother was going to make spaghetti for the mother’s daughter for dinner. –There are no pronouns in the sentence and it makes the sentence very hard to follow.

Here is the same sentence using pronouns.—The mother told her daughter that she was going to make spaghetti for her for dinner.

-          A pronoun may also stand in the place of an understood noun.

o   Ex. If a person has been named before-hand, then the sentence—Mary where did you put the fishing pole?—Can just be cut down to—Where did you put the fishing pole?

-          A pronoun can also stand in as an indefinite it.

o   Ex. It is way too cold.—it is the indefinite and is understood to mean the temperature (of something).

According to The Chicago Manual of Style 16^th edition, there are six classes of pronouns.

1.       personal

2.       demonstrative

3.       interrogative

4.       relative

5.       indefinite

6.       adjective

Next week will be all about personal pronouns. Don't forget to come back and see how pesky pronouns can get!

This post would not have been possible without:

The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition

and

All About Pronouns

Gruesday--NOUNING like crazy!

Hey everyone it’s GRUESDAY again! 

To mark the second week of my doing Gruesome Grammar Tuesday, I have decided to go back to the basics and discuss each part of speech. It may surprise you to know (it surprised me) according to the 16^th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, modern grammarians today cannot agree on how many parts of speech there are. Some say that there are as few as three when others say there as many as fifteen. I’m sure you’re thinking what I am—please dear lord do not let there be fifteen parts of speech! And since I refuse to consider that as a possibility, lol, I am going to take the next seven weeks (eight including today) to delve into each of the eight basic parts of speech.

I often find, when I’m writing, that it’s the simple rules I seem to fudge up on the most. Going back over the basic parts of speech will be hated, lol, but very beneficial.

So, since I’m going with the order of things, today is going to be all about those nosy nouns.

Nouns generally. A noun is a word that names something, whether abstract (intangible) or concrete (tangible). It may be a common noun (the name of a generic class or type of person, place, thing process, activity, or condition) or a proper noun (the formal name of a specific person, place, or thing).

It’s become a little more complex since I learned about it, haha, but the general rule makes sense to me. I have found that nouns are usually the easiest part of the sentence to pick out, though it is not uncommon for nouns to come out the woodwork and do other things such as: being appositives, adjectives, and verbs. I’m going to delve into each of these today to make it easier to figure out when those nosy nouns get sneaky.

Appositive nouns. An appositive is a noun or noun phrase that immediately follows another noun or noun phrase in order to define or further identify it.

ex 1 noun appositive. The insect, a grasshopper, jumped on my shoulder.–in this instance a grasshopper is an appositive of the noun insect.

ex 2 noun phrase appositive. The insect, a large grasshopper of green coloring, jumped on my shoulder.—in this instance a large grasshopper of green coloring is the appositive of the noun insect.

Nouns as adjectives. A noun-to-adjective transfer takes place when a noun modifies another noun. (A helpful way to pick out which is actually the noun and which is the “adjective noun”—the “adjective noun” always comes first.)

ex 1. The morning newspaper.—morning is the “adjective noun” that modifies the noun, newspaper.

ex 2. A shoe shop. –shoe is the “adjective noun” that modifies the noun, shop.

Nouns as verbs. This is a fairly common occurrence that evolves with time and is often one that grammarians have trouble agreeing on. Here are some examples, though it is advised to be careful when using nouns as verbs because it can be a very touchy subject, lol. Some have even named this practice “verbing” and call it a “filthy habit”.

                ex 1. I accessed.—access is the noun that is being used as a verb in this instance. Many people prefer this: I gained access.

                ex 2. More school districts are mainstreaming pupils with special needs.—mainstream is the noun being used as a verb in this instance.

This concludes my exploration of the nosy noun. Though we are NOT by any means done with nouns. They will forever haunt us and you will definitely see them again in my future posts.

Happy Nouning! (Grammarians all over the world are cringing right now. Filthy habit, haha.)

This post would not have been possible without:

Chicago Manual of Style 16^th ed.

Appositives

Nouns as Adjectives

Gruesome Grammar Tuesday (Gruesday)

Welcome to Gruesome Grammar Tuesday—or as I like to call it Gruesday! 

As a writer and an editor, grammar plays a huge (and sometimes hated) role in my life. You never know just how important it is until you find yourself stuck in the middle of a sentence, wondering if what you’ve already written makes sense at all. Well NEVER FEAR Gruesday is here! Every week I’m going to do a new post reviewing a different grammar rule, to help myself and you as well.

For my first Gruesday post I am going to discuss a question that an author asked me the other day. I never considered it before now and it ended up being a really great inquiry.

The difference between content and contents.

If I hadn’t been asked this question, there’s a good chance that I might have never considered it. What is the difference between the two? (Besides the obvious one, lol)

In my search to answer this question I went to Dictionary.com to see the difference in definitions of the two words. When looking up content the first thing (even before any definition) was this:

con·tent
1 [kon-tent] Show IPA
noun
1. 
Usually, contents. 

I almost thought this was reason enough to stop looking. The words seem interchangeable and after more searching, I found that indeed, in some cases they are, BUT not always.
As my search online continued I found this great explanation of the two.

Contents usually refers to specific, individual things contained in a whole.

Whereas content usually refers to a more general concept. All of the things within something are seen as one whole thing.

Example: Books often have a "table of contents". This is a listing of all the specific, individual chapters contained in the book.

Your grammar book probably has a table of contents which lists the specific chapters/units and the specific grammar points covered in each.

But you might say the content of your grammar book is grammar (a more general concept).

This explanation makes it sound simple, right? Contents refers specific things and content is a more vague description. And this is correct in every situation, right? Wrong.
This is grammar so there is never a simple or one sided conclusion to anything. (Never forget that!)

The usage of the word depends on a lot of things. For example—contents is the plural form of content so if you were to say something like:

 The content(s) is(are) sewing materials.

Which would it be? Well, if we refer to our rule farther up it should be content because it is not talking about the specific articles within the container, right? Wrong again. Because more than one item is being referred to (plural) and all items are countable within the container which means that would use the plural form of the noun and the correct sentence would be:

The contents are sewing materials.

Confused yet? Haha, I’m not trying to be confusing. At the end of the day it is up to the writer’s discretion to look at the sentence, evaluate what you know and go with what sounds best. That’s just how grammar works. With using it comes great choices and decisions to be made. Unfortunately being a writer means you will make wrong decisions all the time, even when you know your rules, haha.

I hope this explanation was useful. 

May your future writing be full of grammatically correct content!

Happy Gruesday! 

Sources:

english-test.net

dictionary.com