WRITING CHEAT SHEET If your children need an editor for their papers and you can’t remember the basics, here’s a refresher course on the parts of speech. Noun Nouns are people, places or things. Example: mother (person); restaurant (place); trombone (thing) Proper Noun Names of specific people, places and things. Proper nouns are always capitalized. Example: Katharine Hepburn, France, Golden Gate Bridge Common Noun If it’s not a proper noun, then it’s a common noun. Example: boy, home, pencil Abstract Noun Consisting of intangible qualities, abstract nouns consist of ideas and qualities. Example: freedom, fear, integrity Adjective Used for descriptive purposes, an adjective is a word that modifies or qualifies a noun or a pronoun. Example: blue trucks; forty-five trucks; the big truck Verb A verb expresses action or a state of being. Example: He ran to the store (action). They are funny (state of being). Intransitive Verb An intransitive verb has a subject but does not require an object or a complement to complete its meaning. Example: Nobody cares. Transitive Verb A transitive verb transfers its action from the subject to the object of the sentence. Transitive verbs always take a direct object and sometimes an indirect object to complete their meaning. Examples: The boys built a tree house. (The verb built requires the direct object “tree house” to complete its meaning or to answer the question “What did they build?”) Sarah gave her mother flowers. (The verb gave requires both a direct object—flowers—and an indirect object to complete the question, “To whom did she give the flowers?”) Linking Verb A linking verb connects the subject to a predicate noun, which renames the subject, or a predicate adjective, which describes the subject. Example: Julia Roberts is a movie star. (Movie star renames the subject, Julia Roberts.) Example: The apple is rotten. (Rotten describes the subject, apple.) Adverbs Modifying a verb, an adjective or another adverb, adverbs tell where, when, how, why, under what circumstances and to what extent. Adverbs usually end in –ly, with some exceptions. Examples: He drove nearby. [where] He drove yesterday. [when] He drove carefully. [how] Gerund Always ending with the suffix –ing, a gerund is a verbal noun. Example: Swimming is my favorite sport. (Swimming, although a verb in most instances, acts as the sentence’s subject.) Present Participle Usually used in phrases, present participles also end with the suffix -ing and help relate a present action to the finite verb of the sentence. Example: Swimming out of the raft, he got a cramp. (The present participle, swimming, relates directly to when the boy got a cramp.) Past Participle Expressed in a completed action, a past participle is traditionally one of the principal parts of the sentence’s verb. Example: His cramped leg still aches. (The cramping is in the past.) Infinitive Considered the base form of a verb, an infinitive always appears with the preposition “to” and the root verb. Example: I told him to leave tomorrow. Pronouns A word that takes the place of a noun in a sentence, there are only about 100 pronouns. The noun replaced by a pronoun is called its antecedent. Examples: I, me, my, mine, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, we, us, our, ours, they, them, their, theirs Prepositions A word that comes before a noun or pronoun, a preposition creates a phrase that modifies another word in the sentence. The noun or the pronoun is called the object of the preposition, and the phrase that is created is called a prepositional phrase. Example: She spilled the drink on him. Prepositions include: about, above, after, as, at, before, behind, below, concerning, despite, down, during, for, in, near, out, over, past, since, to, on, toward, under, until, with Conjunctions Like a preposition, a conjunction shows the relationship between parts of a sentence. Example: Steve and Sarah grew vegetables in their garden, but they didn’t grow fruits. Example: Unless we’re lucky, we aren’t going to get there before the concert starts. Example: We will be neither swayed nor delayed in our deliberations. By Natalie Bauer