Math phobia has a cousin, it’s grammar anxiety. The very word, “grammar,” probably calls up bad memories of being the last person in your 6th grade class to understand what “subordinate clause” means. But the truth is, the basic terminology and concepts of grammar aren’t all that hard to master—and understanding them is the surest route to eliminating common grammatical errors from your speech. This review is designed to remind you of those grammar basics if they’ve slipped away from you since 6th grade or to teach them to you for the first time if you were looking out the window and not paying attention. We’re going to cover two basic areas. First, we’ll go over the eight parts of speech—nouns, verbs, and so on—and remind you what they are and what roles they play in a sentence. Second, we’ll look at the parts of a sentence: subjects, predicates, clauses, and complements, and show you how to tell one from the other.

There are more than 500,000 words in the English language, but fortunately for us students of English grammar, only eight parts of speech. “Part of speech” refers to the part or role that a word plays within a phrase or a sentence—its function. We’ll look at them in detail in a moment, but here’s the 60-second overview of the eight roles words can play:

This idea of function is critical when identifying the various parts of speech, because many words have more than one possible role. In other words, you can’t simply take our 500,000-plus English words and divide them into eight categories for the various parts of speech. It’s a little trickier than that. Some nouns, for example, love to get dressed up and go parading around as verbs and adjectives. Some adverbs and prepositions have passports that allow them to cross each other’s borders. And a lot of pronouns moonlight as adjectives. So the important thing is not to think in terms of a permanent relationship between a given word and a part of speech—only some of them believe in “‘til death do us part”—but instead to look at what role that word is playing in the particular sentence in question.

Here’s an example of how one word, in this case, “love,” can have several different functions:

All right now, roll up your sleeves and let’s dig into each of the eight parts of speech. We’ll start with nouns, pronouns, and verbs, the parts that really do the heavy lifting within a sentence.

A noun is simply a name, a word that identifies whatever it is you’re talking about, such as “Jack” or “home” or “rock.” You may remember the term “noun” being defined in school as a person, place, or thing. This is a good way to think about it provided you remember that “thing” refers to more than the things you can point to or touch. It also includes intangibles—ideas, concepts, qualities and actions. “Freedom” is a noun. “Progress” is a noun. “Embarrassment” and “running” and “millimeter” are nouns. Basically, anything you can put the word “the” in front of is a noun or is being used as a noun. “Being used as a noun” refers back to the idea that many words can play more than one part of speech. “Light,” for example, can be both a noun, as in the light of day or a verb, as in I light the candles. Just remember that whenever the word in question is being used to name or identify something, you’re dealing with a noun.

Pronouns are words such as “he,” “she,” “it,” and “that,” which take the place of nouns so that we don’t have to drive each other nuts saying things such as Harry went to Harry’s car and then Harry drove to pick up Susan, and then Harry and Susan drove to Harry father’s house. Instead, we can use pronouns to refer back to some of the nouns in the sentence, and say, Harry went to his car and then he drove to pick up Susan, and then they went to his father’s house. If you have trouble remembering the definition, just take the word apart: “pro” means “for” as in “pro-government” or “pro vs. con,” so “pronoun” simply means “for a noun.”

It would be great if pronouns were no more complicated than that. But they come in all kinds of flavors and varieties designed to handle different assignments within a sentence, and they won’t do anything outside of their specific job descriptions. They get all bent out of shape if you make them try. Here’s the rundown on the three basic facts you need to understand about pronouns in order to keep them in line.

It’s not critical to memorize where each and every pronoun falls within these groups, but a quick overview of the following information will give you a framework for understanding what’s ahead.

Personal pronouns refer mostly to—you guessed it—persons. They’re used to identify the person speaking, the person being spoken to, and the person or thing being spoken about. They’re familiar words such as “I,” “me,” “she,” “it,” “they,” and “you,” to name just a handful. Within the larger group of personal pronouns is a subgroup called intensive or reflexive pronouns. These are words such as “myself,” “himself,” and “themselves.” We won’t worry any more about the intensive or reflexive variety here, but they do cause trouble sometimes, and you’ll find a lesson devoted to them in Chapter 2. Personal pronouns in general are the most complex group and are implicated in more errors than their other pronoun friends. Facts number two and three ahead focus on the two most important complexities of this tribe.

Demonstrative pronouns point out specific persons, places, and things. Luckily, there are only two: “this” and “that.” Okay, there are four if you count their plural forms: “these” and “those.”

Indefinite pronouns do the opposite job of demonstrative pronouns. They’re used when you don’t have a particular person, place, or thing to which to refer. This is a big group of pronouns, but a few common ones are “any,” “each,” “everyone,” “nobody,” “other,” “several,” “something,” and “nothing.”

Relative pronouns relate a person or thing to something that’s being said about them. The most common are “who,” “whom;” “whose,” “which,” “that,” and “what,” but there are also compound forms such as “whatever,” “whoever,” and so on. Relative pronouns are used to introduce a descriptive phrase within a sentence; for example, Ellen loved the karate class that she took last fall. The relative pronoun “that” refers back to “karate class” and it introduces the descriptive phrase that she took last fall, which tells us something more about the class.

Interrogative pronouns are the curious cousins of relative pronouns. They’re identical to their relative pronoun twins such as “who,” “which,” and “that,” but they’re being used to ask a question: Who took my cake? Which way did he go?

You know this, you just don’t know that you know it. Let’s start by defining terms—and pay attention, because this person and number stuff comes in handy for discussions on verbs, too—“person” is used in this context to refer to the particular person or thing being spoken of. Personal pronouns are the only type of pronouns with forms that vary according to this idea of person, and there are three possible choices in form. The first-person form is used when you’re referring to yourself. Think of the label “first” as reflecting your status as number one in importance (in your own eyes, anyway). “I” is a first-person form. The second-person form is for when you’re referring to the person you’re addressing—“you” is an example. And the third person refers to the person or thing being spoken about, as in “he,” “she,” and “it.”

Wait a minute, you may be thinking. You keep saying “person” as though I never talk about more than one person at a time. Why, I’ve been know to refer to two people at once! In fact, I did it just this morning, when I said, “You kids had better get a move on. ” This is where the question of number comes in. Number simply means the number of people being referred to—either one person or thing, in which case the number is singular, or more than one, in which case the number is plural. Personal pronoun forms vary in number, and so do demonstrative pronouns, as noted earlier when we talked about “this” and “these.”

When you throw the concepts of person and number together, the resulting line-up for personal pronouns is this:

You’ll notice that the singular and plural forms for the second person are the same word, “you.” Nobody said these things always made sense.

We said earlier that the general role of a personal pronoun in a sentence is to stand in for a particular person or thing. Well, the “case” form of that personal pronoun gets a lot more specific by indicating exactly how that pronoun relates to the other words in the sentence. The three cases are the nominative case, which is sometimes called the subjective case; the objective case; and the possessive case. Getting a grip on this concept of case requires some background on the parts of a sentence, which we won’t cover until the second section of this review. So rather than burning up all your circuits with a detailed talk on cases here, we’ll cover this important topic in a separate lesson in Chapter 1.

Verbs describe an action or a state of being. Their role is to make a statement about the subject of your sentence, that is, about whomever or whatever you’re talking. When we refer to a verb describing an action, we mean this in its broadest sense, including not only physical actions such as “run,” “grow,” or “squeeze,” but also nonphysical actions such as “hope,” “solve,” and “need.” Any word describing what the subject of the sentence is doing is an action verb. For example:

But often the subject of the sentence isn’t doing something, it simply is something, such as hungry or female or in line for a promotion. Verbs that express a state of being are called linking verbs, because they link the subject of the sentence to the description of the state or condition that the subject is in. The most common linking verb by far is the verb “to be,” which includes the forms “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” “were,” “have been,” “had been,” “will be,” “will have been,” and others. Here are some sentences featuring the linking verb “to be”:

And here are a few examples of other linking verbs at work. You’ll notice that some of these, such as the verbs “look” and “taste,” can also be action verbs in other contexts:

The verb’s role of expressing action or a state of being is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Verbs are the most powerful part of speech because they not only tell you the nature of the action itself, but also provide other important information about that action. The benevolent verb offers us three manners of descrition, and these are tense, voice, and mood.

The tense form of a verb tells us when the action occurred or will occur. For example, he will jump tells us that the jumping action will occur in the future, whereas he jumped tells us it occurred in the past. Tense forms represent the largest minefield in verb country—the cause of all kinds of errors. The first lesson in Chapter 1 provides a look at tenses in greater depth.

The voice of a verb tells something about the relationship between the action of the verb and the subject of the sentence—the person or thing the sentence is about. The active voice is used to show that the subject is doing the acting, as in John leads the group. The passive voice is used to show that the subject is on the receiving end of the action, as in John is led by the group.

The mood of a verb tells us in what manner the verb is communicating the action. When we make basic statements or ask questions, we use the indicative mood, as in I leave at 5 and Are you taking the car? The indicative mood is the one we use most often. The imperative mood is used to make a request or a command, as in Get in here right now or Bring me a resume. The subjunctive mood is used to express a hypothetical situation or a condition in opposition to the facts and sometimes to express a wish. It is most often used with the verb “to be” in sentences or phrases beginning with “if.” For example, If Jane were home, things would be different and I wish I were rich. The subjunctive mood is not called for often, but when it is, it can be a troublemaker. See the end of Chapter 1 for help in correcting the most common error made with the subjunctive mood.

Adjectives are words that modify nouns and pronouns. That is, they alter slightly the meaning of the noun or pronoun, either by describing something about it or by limiting its meaning to a more definite item or number. In the phrases red hair, swollen feet, and unpredictable temper, the adjectives “red,” “swollen,” and “unpredictable” have modified the nouns “hair,” “feet,” and “temper” by describing a characteristic of each.

It’s easy to think of adjectives only as descriptive words. But then you’d be missing half the fun—adjectives have more personality than that. So let’s have a word about nouns and pronouns functioning as adjectives and also about the articles “a,” “an,” and “the.”

Nouns aren’t satisfied to just stay at home and name things. They go out dressed as adjectives all the time. For example, the word “paper” is a noun. But in the phrase paper airplane, the word “paper” is being used as an adjective modifying the noun “airplane”—it tells us what kind of airplane we’re dealing with. Similarly, in the phrase airplane mechanic, the noun “airplane” is now being used as an adjective to describe the noun “mechanic.”

Like nouns, pronouns are commonly used as adjectives—a pronoun such as “my” before a noun modifies the noun by telling you who it belongs to. Here are a few phrases in which pronouns function as adjectives:

These three go-everywhere, do-everything words are considered adjectives too, even though they have their own name, articles. If this seems confusing, think of how they function: they tell us something more about the noun they’re in front of. For example, “a” and “an” are called indefinite articles, because they refer to any single member of the group named by the noun, but not to a particular or definite member. In the phrases a headache and an elephant, we mean any member of the classes of headaches and elephants. On the other hand, the definite article “the” refers to a specific, definite member of some group. Saying the office instead of an office indicates that we have in mind a particular office and not just any old place of business.

Like adjectives, adverbs are modifiers: They define or limit the meaning of other words. But unlike adjectives, which can only modify nouns or pronouns, adverbs have a kind of prima donna complex. They leave nouns and pronouns alone, but they feel they have something important to say about nearly everybody else—modifying verbs, adjectives, and each other. Let’s look first at the different jobs the adverb can do.

As the name suggests, the most common role of the adverb is to modify the meaning of a verb, usually by answering the questions where, when, how, or to what extent. For example, in the phrase, leave quickly, “leave” is the verb, and the adverb “quickly” describes the manner in which the action of leaving is carried out. A few more examples: Look longingly, answer abruptly, move forward, stop immediately, sometimes play, nearly finish, always love.

Adverbs can also modify adjectives, as in the phrase neatly complete painting. Here, the noun “painting” is modified by the adjective “complete” and the adjective “complete” is modified by the adverb “nearly,” giving us the full meaning that the painting is almost, but not quite, finished. Here are a few more examples of adverbs modifying adjectives:

Adverbs also have little love fests in which they modify each other, as in the sentence, The players were almost evenly matched. Here, the verb matched is modified by the adverb, evenly. Then the adverb evenly is itself modified in turn by another adverb, almost, giving us the meaning that the players are fairly close, but not completely equal, in skill level. A few more examples of adverbs modifying adverbs:

A word about adverb forms: You’ll notice from the preceding examples that while many adverbs such as “evenly” and “precisely” have “-ly” endings, others, such as “somewhat” and “rather” do not. A large group of adverbs fall into the latter category, including—to name only a few—words such as “again,” “late,” “little,” “there,” “often,” “when,” “where,” “why,” “how,” “too,” and “much.” Here are a few examples of these adverbs at work:

In summary, there’s no shortcut such as “-ly” endings or position within the sentence to tell you for certain that a word is an adverb. The only way to know for sure is to figure out if it’s modifying the meaning of a verb, an adjective, or another adverb. If it’s modifying a noun or a pronoun, you’ve got yourself an adjective instead.

Prepositions are a piece of cake. They are simply words used to show a relationship between a noun or a pronoun and certain other words in your sentence. And the easy way to remember this is to think of the word “position” contained within “preposition”—as in the position of one thing relative to another. In the sentence Harry drank himself under the table, “under” is the preposition. It shows the relationship between the unwise “Harry” (a noun) and “table” (another noun). Other common prepositions include “above,” “after,” “around,” “at,” “before,” “below,” “between,” “by,” “during,” “except,” “from,” and “within.”

There is also such a thing as a compound preposition, which serves exactly the same purpose of expressing a relationship between two things, but which is made up of more than one word, such as “according to,” “because of,” and “instead of.”

Here’s a great illustration of how different prepositions can express different relationships between the same sets of words. Watch how the meaning changes if we begin with the preposition across and then substitute others within the same sentence:

It’s also important to remember, as we’ve noted throughout, that some words function as more than one part of speech. Prepositions are no exception. The word outside, for example, can be a noun, as in She wrote his name on the outside of the package; a preposition, as in Please clean that engine outside the house; or an adjective, as in These an outside chance your umbrella will turn up in the lost and found.

Conjunctions are words that join other words and phrases together, just as the back end of the term conjunction suggests. (Think of the junction of two freeways.) There are coordinating conjunctions such as “and,” “or,” “nor,” “but,” “for,” “yet,” and “so,” and subordinating conjunctions such as “because,” “when,” “if,” “though,” “unless,” “until,” and “whether.”

Coordinating conjunctions connect words and phrases that have equal grammatical status. This means nouns with nouns, adjectives with adjectives, and pairs of phrases designed to carry equal weight within the sentence. For example:

Most coordinating conjunctions are made up of one word, such as and or but in the previous examples. But sometimes coordinating conjunctions have two parts, which work in tandem to join comparable words and phrases together. Examples of these are “either/or,” “both/and,” and “not only/but also,” sometimes shortened to “not only/but.” Here’s how they work in a sentence:

Unlike coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions join together parts of a sentence that aren’t on equal grammatical footing. Instead, within the world of that sentence, one of the parts depends upon the other for its meaning and is therefore lower in rank or importance—it’s subordinate to the other. For example, in the sentence He couldn’t go to school because he was sick, “because” is the subordinating conjunction. It introduces the subordinate clause, “because he was sick,” which cannot stand on its own as a sentence but instead depends upon the main portion of the sentence, “he couldn’t go to school,” for its meaning. The following are some more examples of subordinating conjunctions at work. Note two things: First, the phrases they introduce aren’t always at the back end of the sentence; second, many of these conjunctions can also function as other parts of speech such as adverbs and prepositions.

Interjections are words thrown into a sentence to express excitement and intensity in actions or emotion. Common interjections are “Hey!” “Wow!” “Oh no!” and “Great!” Most of these words function in other parts of speech, but when they are used as interjections, they stand alone.

Now that you’ve got your feet wet with the eight parts of speech, it’s time to wade all the way into the water and master the basic parts of a sentence. And that’s just what the next section will help you do.

There is enough detailed terminology floating around on the parts of the sentence to make your head spin. But we’ll just focus here on the basic four: subjects, predicates, clauses, and complements. Before we launch into those, however, let’s make sure we’re straight on the precise definition of a sentence.

You can’t just string together any set of words and punctuation marks you like and call it a sentence—the selection committee for this club is a little more picky than that. In order to qualify, the group of words must express a complete thought.

Without identification and explanation, you’ve got yourself a fragment, a bit, a piece, a parcel—but no sentence. Here are a couple of fragments:

If we said Kelly ran to the door, however, we would have a complete sentence, including both an identification of whom we’re talking about and a statement about her. These two parts are known as the subject and the predicate, the basic foundation of the sentence.

The subject might be one word, such as “he,” but it might also be a group of words, such as “the sweater he got for Christmas” or “the idea that he would get yet another sweater next Christmas.” Here is an example of each of these subjects in a sentence:

Do you see that although the pronoun “he” and the noun “sweater” are involved in all three sentences, the subject changes from one to the other? The first sentence is about a person, and what we learn about him is that he got a sweater. The second sentence is about a thing, the sweater he got for Christmas, and the fact that it was too small. The third sentence is about an abstract concept, the idea of getting another sweater, and the fact that it was bound to frustrate the unfortunate person who would receive it.

The predicate is composed of every other word in the sentence that’s not the subject. As with the subject, this might be only one word, the verb, or it might be a whole group of words. If the sentence is I will go to Austria as soon as the rates get better, the subject, as you probably guessed, is “I,” and the predicate is everything else—“will go to Austria as soon as the rates get better.” Let’s identify the subject and predicate in a few more sentences:

Notice that every single word in the sentence belongs to either the subject or the predicate—once those two parts are identified, there aren’t any words left over. You’ll also notice that while the subject always contains a noun or a pronoun, it can also have other descriptive words—adjectives, prepositions, etc.—surrounding that noun or pronoun. “The television in the den” is the complete subject in the last sentence. The simple subject is the noun “television.”

Those same concepts of “simple” and “complete” apply to predicates. In the sentence Dana’s father went into the hospital yesterday, the complete predicate is “went into the hospital yesterday,” but the simple predicate is the verb, “went.”

We explained earlier that all sentences need to express a complete thought. We also said they need a subject and a verb in order to do that. And we didn’t lie. But we didn’t tell the whole truth either, and that’s where complements come in.

Some verbs need a little help before the sentence they’re in can express a complete thought. And other verbs may not require this help, but you want to provide it anyway in order to express your meaning more precisely. For example, take the verb “take.” If you say she takes, you have both a subject and a verb, but hardly a complete thought. What is it that she’s taking? You need a complement, for example, piano lessons. The sentence She takes piano lessons expresses a complete thought.

There are three types of complements: direct objects, indirect objects, and complements of linking verbs. Don’t worry if this sounds overwhelming—it’s actually fairly simple once you get the hang of it. Let’s look first at direct objects.

Direct objects complete the meaning of verbs expressing action by telling you what or whom is on the receiving end of it. In the previous example, she takes piano lessons, “take” is an action verb and “piano lessons” is a direct object. See if you can identify the direct objects in these sentences:

Indirect objects are also used as complements of action verbs, but they differ from direct objects in a couple of ways. First, they’re almost never used on their own; they usually precede a direct object. Second, rather than answering the questions what or whom, indirect objects answer the questions to whom or for whom. In the sentence Can you hand me that wrench? the indirect object is “me” and the direct object is “wrench.” “Wrench” answers the question what was handed, and “me” answers the question to whom it was handed. Practice picking out the direct and indirect objects in these sentences:

Linking verbs don’t express action, but simply “link” (as their name suggests) the subject of the sentence to the complement, which modifies or describes the subject. The most common linking verb is “to be” (for the forms of the verb “to be” see pages 89-90).

Why have a special category for the complements of linking verbs? Well, when you’ve got a pronoun in the complement of a sentence, it’s important to know whether you’ve got an action verb or a linking verb, because these verbs require different pronouns. All that the complement of a linking verb can do is to describe the subject, so it has the same grammatical form that a subject would, as in the following sentence:

Here the linking verb “was” links the subject “it” with the complement “she.” If the verb were an action verb, it would be followed by “her” as either the direct object (I saw her at the store yesterday) or the indirect object (I gave her the cheese log). But because we’ve got a linking verb, we need the same kind of pronoun in the complement that we would use in the subject position, and that’s “she.” You’ll have plenty of opportunities to practice with this kind of sentence in Chapter 1.

Grab hold of something to hang on to while we discuss clauses, because we’re going to add another layer of complexity.

You may be thinking that this sounds awfully much like the definition of a sentence: subject plus predicate. But the key words here are “located within a sentence.” Sentences can have two or more clauses, each containing its own subject and predicate. Think of it as the difference between a single-family home and an apartment building. The separate house has all the basic elements required in a home together under one roof—kitchen, bedrooms, etc. The apartment building contains more than one unit, or home, each with the same set of basic elements, but those units don’t stand alone, they’re together under one roof. A sentence can be like the house, with just one basic subject and predicate, or it can be like the apartment building, full of units, or clauses, each with its own subject and predicate. Here is an example of a sentences with more than one clause:

There are two clauses here. One is “we tickled his feet,” where the subject is “we,” and the predicate is “tickled his feet.” The other clause is “he begged for mercy,” and there the subject is “he,” and the predicate is “begged for mercy.” This type of clause is called an independent clause.

Here are two more sentences featuring independent clauses. See if you can identify them before we jump in with the answer:

Note that in all these cases, you could have used any of these clauses as a sentence on its own. For example, “None of the guests liked the host. They all enjoyed themselves at the party.”

The second basic type of clause is the subordinate clause, and its nature is to be clingy. (It is sometimes called the dependent clause.) It can’t end the relationship with the main clause in the sentence, because it knows it doesn’t have what it takes to go off on its own.

A subordinate clause doesn’t contain the main idea of the sentence as a whole, even though it contains a subject and a predicate. Instead, it’s as though all the words in the clause sign a contract agreeing to function as one of three parts of speech, an adjective, an adverb, or a noun, as a means of providing more information about something in the main clause. Here’s an example of each type.

The main clause is “I only pretended to read the copy of War and Peace.” The subordinate adjective clause is “that I brought to the beach.” Do you see how this couldn’t stand on its own as a sentence? In this clause, the subject is “I,” and the predicate is “brought to the beach.” The whole clause as a unit modifies the noun “copy” in the main clause by telling us more about it.

The main clause is “she turns heads.” The subordinate adverbial clause is “because she wears too much perfume.” This clause modifies the verb “turns” in the main clause by telling us why the turning happens.

The subordinate noun clause here is “that she has too many names for one person.” The subject of the noun clause is “she,” the predicate is “has too many names for one person,” and the whole clause functions as a noun by naming what the problem is.

Congratulations, you’ve graduated from grammar school. You now have enough basic information to get the most out of the program that follows and to bore your friends at parties with your knowledge of the mechanics of grammar. We recommend that you go over this review a few times to really get the concepts and the terminology down pat. And if you ever have a question when you’re going through the chapters ahead, remember that you have a friend in the Grammar Review. So if you have to look up “subordinate clause” four or five times as you work through the program, don’t worry. We won’t tell.