Grammar! Again! Parts of Speech, or "Oh yeah, those things." · 9:20am Sep 15th, 2013
I realize now that I might have jumped the gun with my last post. A number of people approached me with confusion, the very people I sought to help!
Well, my friends, this just won't do.
I'll preface the meat of this blog post with a plea:
Please tell me when you are confused.
You are probably not alone in feeling that way. This is a confusing and oft misunderstood subject matter, and my goal is to help you understand it. I cannot do this, though, if you don't illuminate for me what you don't understand. I'm just trying to help, guys.
Grammar!
This had best be the feeling you experience when reading this. Grammar is awesome.
Ok, so grammar can be a bit of a scary beast to tackle, full of scary terms and foreign words. It is intimidating, I realize. That's why today I am going to break down for you what goes into a sentence. It will be both a glossary of terms of sorts, as well as a guide on sentence construction.
I will boldface any terms you should keep an eye out for.
The first thing we're going to do is give you everything you need to make a sentence of your very own!
[Subject] [Verb]
A subject is the person or thing performing the verb. The subject will always be a noun. A noun is a person, place, or thing.
A verb is the action being performed by the subject.
If you have both of those things, you have a sentence. If you are missing either one you don't have a sentence, you have a sentence fragment. It is an error to have a sentence fragment, generally speaking, but can also be used as a way to adjust the flow and pacing of a passage. This little trick is perhaps, though, best saved for a different blog post.
So let's make a sentence with a random subject and verb.
Twilight read.
Okay, while not exciting, that is, in fact, a sentence! It's also a clause, though. Before I get too far ahead of myself, allow me to explain. Clauses are used to break up complex sentences, and consist of a subject and a verb. You can think of them as a unit of a sentence.
Let's move on.
The other major part of speech to wrap your head around is the adjective. Adjectives are descriptors that modify nouns.
Before we can add this to our sentence, however, we need something else in our toolbox. We need determiners.
Determiners are a class of adjectives that help answer the question: "what" or "which" noun? The most vital and important determiners to remember, and probably the poster-boys of determiners, are the articles. There are two sorts of articles: definite and indefinite. The definite article is "The", and the indefinite articles are "A" and "An". (You use "A" preceding words that begin with a consonant or an aspirated "H" (such as in "Hero") and "An" before words that begin with a vowel.) Besides articles, though, we have other determiners such as "Many", "Not much", or "All of the". The important thing to remember is that determiners answer the question: "Which noun are you talking about".
The reason we need both of these things, is that in order to put an adjective on a noun, you have to have a determiner.
An example:
The purple unicorn read.
If we were to leave it at "Purple unicorn read", it wouldn't make much sense. The "purple" helps to distinguish the unicorn, but the determiner points it in the right direction. So we now have two other constructions we can use.
Next up let's discuss adverbs.
Adverbs, quite simply, are just adjectives that modify verbs (and also sometimes adjectives and even other adverbs). They typically end in "-ly" and most simply are placed directly after the verb, however they can show up in many places—for instance you'll notice in the previous clause that the adverbs "typically" and "simply" both precede the verbs they modify: "end" and "placed" (though in this case "placed" is a participle and functioning as an adverb itself modifying "are". Thus "simply" is actually modifying another adverb—I digress).
Let's try it out, shall we?
Twilight read carefully
Right, that's not so bad. We can see that adjectives help answer the question of "how". What's next, you ask? Objects.
Objects are the people or things acted upon or for by the action of the verb. That might sound like a bunch of gibberish, so I'm going to give you two example sentences.
Twilight read a book.
Twilight read to Rainbow Dash.
Both "book" and "Rainbow Dash" are functioning as objects in their respective sentences.
Now it might seem obvious, but you can actually combine these two into one sentence.
Twilight read a book to Rainbow Dash.
Now comes for the amazing part. These two objects are completely different, because there are two sorts of objects! 
The "book" in the sentence is a direct object, and "Rainbow Dash" is an indirect object.
A direct object is acted upon by the verb.
An indirect object is acted for the verb.
"Book" (direct object) is being read (verb).
"Rainbow Dash" (indirect object) is being read (verb) to.
Those are the major parts of speech. There are a few more that come into play when we start making compound sentences. I'll save those, though, when I go over compound sentences and comma rules. There's a lot more to figure out, but the terms covered here are the building blocks of language. By learning these, you'll be able to better understand what works and why. Here's a teaser: Did you realize you can use an entire clause as an adverb? It's true, they're called adverbial clauses
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So that wraps it up, folks. I'll once again emphasize that if you didn't understand anything please pipe up in the comments. It will not only help you out, but will be a resource and boon for those who stumble across the blog later.
Cheers,
-Comrade
Comrade stayed up all night to grammar again I see...
(lol)
But hey, at least he put the belt away. I'm still sore from the last one of these.
Edit: I think this is the first time I've actually seen the view counter tick up to 2 on anything... wow. Kind of cool, but unrelated. (See? It pays to stay up!)
1351475
Huzzah for insomnia!
May I link to your grammar blogs in my "Helpful Tips"? They seem almost custom-made for the thing.
1351567
Sure thing!
Well this is definitely going in the directory. I also now know what I would like you to get to next.
Contractions. You'd think they'd be easy: they're = they are, we're = we are, and so on, but fro what I've been seeing in some of these stories of late, they're quite obviously not.
By the way, I got the Resource into the School For New Writers. You can check it out here. And thanks for making these.
1354623
Contractions! I suppose I can write a quickie up. That one shouldn't take too long. It might be helpful to include homophones in that, as a lot of contraction errors come up with were/we're, there/they're/their, etc.
And thank you for the links
! Hopefully together we can spread the good word of good grammar to the masses
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This article taught me more than 7 years of school.