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Saturday, September 14, 2013

English Writing Basics


Was Grade School Really That Long Ago?


I took a computer based course at work that was meant to improve writing in business. The main topic was an in depth discussion of the eight parts of speech. For those of you who have also forgotten, the eight parts are as follows: Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Adverbs, Adjectives, Conjunctions, Interjections and Prepositions.

I am embarrassed to admit that I received a score of only 68% correct on the pre-course exam. (Struggled to answer any Simple, Perfect or Progressive verb tense questions correctly.) Although I took this course lightly, thinking that this was all taught back in grade school, I was shocked at how much I’d not retained. Plus there have been numerous changed in English grammar. For instance it is now proper to begin a sentence with a proposition, such as “but”. I thought that for as much as I read and write on a daily basis, an English grammar course would be a waste of time, it wasn’t. Well, hopefully my writing has not truly been God awful all this time!


In this series of posts I am going to share some of what I was retaught in this class.
1)  The 8 Parts of Speech
2)  The Use of Nouns

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