Whenever you are re-structuring sentences, keep in mind that you have plenty of readily-available, effective tools to employ. A particularly useful one consists of four parts — they are the rhetorical ...

In a previous write-up, we started a discourse on PHRASES and CLAUSES as salient particles of a SENTENCE. STRUCTURAL and FUNCTIONAL types of sentences were also outlined as critical aspects worthy of ...

Last week, we started discussing the differences between a phrase, clause and a sentence. We defined a phrase as a group of words without a subject and a predicate, though standing together to form a ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

1. Relative clauses are “embedded” grammatical structures, contained inside other grammatical structures. 2. Relative clauses play a central role in English discourse. 3. Relative clause knowledge is ...

If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the ...

SPEAKER 1: Sometimes in your writing, you need to link ideas. SPEAKER 2: Because they are related. SPEAKER 1: Good example. ‘Because’ is a conjunction. SPEAKER 2: Conjunctions are linking words.

The preceding chapter showed how sentences can be streamlined by reducing their adjective clauses to adjective phrases — a simple process that omits the relative pronouns “that,” “which,” “who,” “whom ...

Today’s topic is going to be a bit technical. Although it centres on three common grammatical elements, it involves some technicalities, the type we usually want to as much as possible play down in ...