• Parts of speech: categorizing words based on the way it is used in a sentence, and its relationship with other words of that sentence. The eight categories are verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections.
  • Verbs: a word (such as jump, think, happen, or exist ) that is usually one of the main parts of a sentence and that expresses an action, an occurrence, or a state of being. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Nouns: a word that is the name of something (such as a person, animal, place, thing, quality, idea, or action) and is typically used in a sentence as subject or object of a verb or as object of a preposition. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Pronouns: a word that can function by itself as a noun phrase and that refers either to the participants in the discourse (e.g., I, you ) or to someone or something mentioned elsewhere in the discourse (e.g., she, it, this ). (Source: Oxford Dictionary)
  • Adjectives: a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.  (Source: Oxford Dictionary). For example: beautiful girl, sunny day, red car.
  • Adverbs: a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word-group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc. (e.g., gently, quite, then, there).
  • Conjunctions: a word used to connect clauses or sentences or to coordinate words in the same clause (e.g., and, but, if). (Source: Oxford Dictionary)
  • Prepositions: a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause, as in “the man on the platform,” “she arrived after dinner,” “what did you do it for?” (Source: Oxford Dictionary)
  • Interjections: a word that conveys or exclaims an emotion or strong feeling, and which can stand on its own. For example: ‘oh’, ‘alas’, ‘ouch’, ‘wow’.
  • Participle: a word formed from a verb (e.g., going, gone, being, been) and used as an adjective (e.g., working woman, burned toast) or a noun (e.g., good breeding). In English, participles are also used to make compound verb forms (e.g., is going, has been). (Source: Oxford Dictionary) There are two types of participles: present participle and past participle.
  • Present participle: the form of a verb, ending in -ing in English, used in the following ways:

in forming continuous tenses, e.g. in I’m thinking, alone
in non-finite clauses, e.g. in sitting here, I haven’t a care in the world
as a noun, e.g. in good thinking
as an adjective, e.g. in running water (Source: Oxford Dictionary)

  • Past participle: the form of a verb, typically ending in –ed, – d, –t, –en or –n in English, that is used in forming perfect and passive tenses and sometimes as an adjective, e.g. looked in ‘have you looked’? and lost in ‘lost property’. (adapted from the Oxford Dictionary)
  • Dangling Participle: a participle phrase is said to be dangling when the participle modifies an unintended/unrelated noun or pronoun of the sentence.  For example- ‘Being not properly centrifuged, we could not test the samples.’ This sentence is confusing since the ‘samples’, which the participle intends to modify, appears at the end of the sentence, and not next to its context.
  • Clause: a part of a sentence that has its own subject and verb. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Phrase: a group of two or more words that express a single idea but do not usually form a complete sentence. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Predicate: the part of a sentence or clause that expresses what is said of the subject and that usually consists of a verb with or without objects, complements, or adverbial modifiers. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Types of sentences: there are four basic types of sentences: Simple, compound, complex and compound-complex.

Simple sentence: a sentence which contains only one clause, with a single subject and predicate.
Compound sentence: a sentence which has at least two independent clauses, more than one subject or predicate.
Complex sentence: a sentence which contains an independent clause and one or more dependant clauses.
Compound-complex sentence: a sentence which contains two or more independent clauses and at least one dependant clause.

  • Punctuation marks: a mark, such as a full stop, comma, or question mark, used in writing to separate sentences and their elements, and to clarify meaning. (Source: Oxford Dictionary)
  • Antecedent: A word, phrase, clause, or sentence to which another word (especially a following relative pronoun) refers. (Source: Oxford Dictionary) For example: Since the samples were not conditioned, we could not test them. (‘samples’ is the antecedent of the pronoun ‘them’).
  • Modifier: a word (such as an adjective or adverb) or phrase that describes another word or group of words. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary) For example: The red car has a noisy engine. (‘red’ is the modifier for ‘car’ and ‘noisy’ is the modifier for ‘engine’).
  • Syntax: the way in which words are put together to form phrases, clauses, or sentences. (Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary)
  • Style: is defined by the way the author organizes his thoughts, and presents them to his audience.