Grammar: A Refresher In Basics - article

Grammar can trip up even the best of us, but it doesn’t have to bore you to death. Remember, good grammar helps you express yourself more clearly and creatively. Here are a few refreshers for writers.

Avoid the passive voice as if the devil himself lurked behind every instance of it. Passive voice happens when the most important part of your sentence, the thing that should "do," gets second place under a weak verb "to be." Here’s an example:

Weak: "The bread was eaten by the dog."

Strong: “The dog eats bread.” The dog does all the work in this sentence. So why give "bread" primary placement?

Instead of putting the dog last, put it first, and give it a verb that tells you something about 'how' the dog eats. Perhaps something like this: "The dog devoured the bread." or "The dog nibbled at the bread."

Don't use commas for run-on sentences. Concise equals better, and commas cannot separate two completely independent clauses without a conjunction. Check it out….

Poor: "The dog, ravenous with hunger, devoured the bread, he ate with abandon because he was so hungry."

Good: "The ravenous dog devoured the bread with abandon because he was so hungry."

Without "he ate," "with abandon" works all right as a part of a sentence. Before, it was begging to stand alone.

Remember your parts of speech, if only to help you remember how to use them. Adjectives describe nouns. Adverbs describe verbs. Verbs perform actions. A new school of thought opines that you should not use adverbs in fiction, because they lead to laziness. "The ravenous dog wolfed down the bread" sounds better than the adverb version: "The ravenous dog speedily ate the bread." "Walked quickly" is lame compared to "paced." Every now and then, you must use an adverb, but it’s better to use powerful verbs.

"Fragments happen" is a full sentence, but "Fragments and parts of speech in the grand scheme of things" should not. A full sentence has a subject and something for the subject to do (predicate). In the first sentence quoted, "Fragments" is my subject and "happen" is my predicate. The longer, actual fragment has only a subject--"fragments and parts of speech"--with a brief descriptor--"in the grand scheme of things."

Sometimes, in the middle of a long sentence you forget to match your subject with your verb. A dangling participle is perhaps the best example of confusion.

Poor: "Screaming as bread crumbs cascaded from their mouths, the trees waited as the people attacked." The participle, "screaming" et al, seems to modify trees. You know that trees don't scream, but the sentence makes it seem as if they do.

Good: "The trees waited as the people attacked, screaming as bread crumbs cascaded from their mouths." Put the participle close to the word it's modifying, and now the people scream.

A quick read-aloud will usually help you catch weird phrases in your writing. Reading to someone else is even better!