A basis for composition 9780675098489, 0675098483

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A Basis for Composition

Barbara R. Carson University of Georgia

Columbus

Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co. A Bell & Howell Company Sydney London ~ Toronto

Published by Charles E. Merrill Publishing Co. A Bell & Howell Company Columbus, Ohio 43216

This book was set in Optima. Production Editor: Lucinda Ann Peck. Cover Design Coordination: Will Chenoweth. Text Designer: Lucinda Ann Peck. Cover Photo: Larry Hamill.

Copyright © 1982, by Bell & Howell Company. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 81-84043 International Standard Book Number: 0-675-09848-3 Printed in the United States of America 1234567 89 10—86 85 84 83 82

Contents TO THE INSTRUCTOR

ix

TO THE STUDENT

xi

1

2

WORDS

AND THE SENTENCE

Words

Z

One Route to New Words

4

Essay: ‘Paying through the nose’ and other taxing phrases The Sentence Sentence Punctuation

9

Diagnostic Test 2

THE NOUN

10 AND

THE PARAGRAPH

Nouns Sentences

|

INTRODUCING THE VERB AND THE PARAGRAPH What Is a Verb? Diagnostic Test Two-part and Two-plus-part Verbs Using Details Essay: Indicators of Spring Abound Using Examples Signaling Examples

4

16 LZ 19

Paragraphs A Skeleton Paragraph The Topic Sentence

3

5 8

19 22 23

CONTINUING 26 26 27, 27, 30 32 33 35

Positioning the Topic Sentence

37

MORE

42

ABOUT

Capitalization

Plurals

NOUNS

42

|

43

iii

Contents

Noun-Verb Agreement Cautions

Articles and Nouns Adjective Modifiers and Nouns Noun Adjuncts and Nouns Comma

Usage

Arranging Details The Paragraph and the Essay Essay: Hair Razing

Ne

46 47 50 52 53 53 Dy 62 63

MECHANICS Hyphens Word Combinations Numbers Letter-Word Combinations Prefixes

Capitals Italics

Quotation Marks Indirect Quotations Other Punctuation with Quotation Marks The Ellipsis

Essay: In Louisiana: Jazzman’s Last Ride

SEVEN NOUN

FUNCTIONS

What Are Noun Functions? More About Prepositional Phrases (Noun Function III) Subject-Verb Agreement and the Frenoasionel Phrase Diction Note

More About Appositives (Noun Function IV) More About the Apostrophe (Noun Function V) © A Writer’s Concerns Maintaining Unity Finding Something to Say Organizing

88 89 91

93 94 95 102 102 105

Essay: Cruelty and Sunday Dinner

107

THE BASIC SENTENCE

112

Diagnostic Test The Subject

112 113

Contents

Do-It-Yourself Verbs — Indirect Object and Object Complement Sentences More about Organizing Materials—Classification Essay: A Veggie Bore

113 115 115 116 121 125 129 135

JOINING THINGS

140

Coordination and Punctuation

140 140

Inverted Sentence Order

Core Pattern 1: S V Core Pattern 2: S VO Core Pattern 3: S V SC

Coordinating Conjunctions Correlating Conjunctions

Coordination without Conjunctions

Parallelism (or List Logic) Subordination Noun Subordinate Clauses Adjective Subordinate Clauses Position of Modifiers

Case of Pronoun in Adjective or Noun Clauses Punctuation of Adjective Clauses Adverb Clauses

142

142 145 147 150 152 153 153

The Missing Conjunction

156

Coordination vs. Subordination

159 161

Three Sets of Connectives

Writing Explanations of Causes and Consequences Essay: Mobility as Reason for Crime Hike Logic of Reasoning Effects or Consequences Essay: Medical Sleuthing Essay: Water Shortage in Connecticut

167 168 169 172 173 175

PRONOUNS

180

Diagnostic Test Kinds of Pronouns Personal Pronouns

180 181 181 184 186 187 187 189

Compound Personal Pronouns Interrogative/Relative Pronouns Indefinite Pronouns Agreement Personal vs. Indefinite Pronouns

vi

Contents

Indefinite Pronouns as Adjectives or Conjunctions Agreement—Influenced by Adjectives Correlative Conjunctions and Agreement Demonstrative Pronouns

10

VERB CHARACTERISTICS Conjugating Verbs The Verb’s Principal Parts

200

.

First Principal Part Second Principal Part Third Principa! Part Fourth Principal Part Varieties of Tenses Progressive Tenses

The Perfect Tenses Passive Voice

Mood, the Attitude Expressed by a Verb

11

200 202 202 204 204 204 205 205 206 211 214

The Writer’s Choice of Verb Form Essay: Soup Making Essay: Crossing the January Flats Essay: Of a Mean Old Man, Kids, and Puppies

216 217 219 220

VERBALS

224

Diagnostic Test

224 225 225 226 226 228 228 230 231

More About Verbals Adjectives vs. Verbal-Adjectives Punctuating Modifying Verbals Verbal Phrases Two Notes Concerning Infinitives Dangling Verbals Voice and Tense with Verbals The Absolute Phrase Verbal Exercises Review Exercises

The Way a Writer May Work Reviewing Paragraphs and the Essay

12

190 190 191 192

232 236 241 241

ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS

248

Diagnostic Test The Nature of Adjectives and Adverbs Movability of Modifiers

249 249 259

———— eee ee Qayne e

Contents

13

14

vii

Comparison of Adjectives and Adverbs Writing Explanations of Likenesses and Differences Essay: Peaceful Coexistence in Korea

264 266 271

ANALOGY

276

Essay: Mixed Essay: Other

284 286 286 290

The Fat Mind Metaphors Watch That Malaphor Useful Figures of Speech

GETTING STARTED

294

Planning the Essay

294 295

What? Why? How?

15

Essay: Signal Caller for the Hurt Writing Beginnings and Endings More About Closings Essay: Tarnished Silver

298 301 305 309

STYLE: A WRITER’S CHOICES

314

Diction Essay: The Life and Death of a Few Well-chosen Words Point of View

314 319 325 328 330 332 333

REVISE AND CORRECT

338

I. Il. Ill. IV.

VI. Diction

338 340 341 342 345 348

WRITER TO READER ANSWER KEY

352 Shops

Essay: Essay: Essay: Essay:

16

The Wonderful Art of Weathercasting Drawbridges Slow You, and That’s Not Bad The Seat of the Scornful A Slob Is a Slob, Is a—

Sentence Construction Pronoun Usage Modifiers Internal Punctuation

V. Spelling

17

To the Instructor The typical students facing you and this text are not enthusiastic about grammar. Some even hate it! Many have had, probably, a lot of it. They ‘learned’ definitions and rules long ago without any real understanding. To repeat those now would do no one much good. Grammar needs to make sense now to be useful at last. This

book

makes

sense.

It does

not talk down

to students,

oversimplify grammar, or leave out its complexity. It includes all of grammar but with important differences. First, it re-defines where traditional definitions have been found to be confusing, and it clarifies terms in understandable language. Second, it presents the whole of grammar in a logical sequence for learning. Most grammar texts are organized according to the principle of classification. One section will consider all parts of speech, another the sentence complete with clauses and phrases, then the serious sentence errors, and so on. This text is a process analysis. It builds students’ understanding of grammar gradually and logically, moving from noun to verb to core sentences to combinations of and additions to core sentences. The book starts with the noun because it is the one element most students “‘know.”” At the same time, students can quickly eliminate some easy errors connected with the noun’s plural spellings, capitals, or apostrophes and avoid many red-penciled corrections in their

paragraphs.

i

The text introduces sentence elements and punctuation rules as they emerge naturally. The noun, for example, leads to the adjective, but the adjective will also be considered later with the linking-verb sentence and still later with adverbs. Subject-verb agreement is introduced early because it develops from the fact that nouns can be plural, and also because its errors, too, draw costly teacher comments.

But subject-verb problems are not explored exhaustively at first mention. The text will come back to this matter as it does to others at later, appropriate times. The book then is obviously designed to be worked from front to back at a pace that accelerates as the student builds a base of

To the Instructor

understanding. However, you as teacher or the individual student can adjust the pace. Frequent diagnostic tests will either show students proof that they need to learn the material that follows or reassure them that all they need to do is use it for a quick review. Instructor or student can also make use of the index and change the order of study. The difficulty of the sentences within exercises increases gradually as the students build their writing skills. Early sentences contain no information not already explained. Thus students can work with the whole sentence right from the beginning, avoiding the frustration that can come when they are expected to focus on one or two words only and ignore anything else. There are comparatively few error-correction exercises, which emphasizes that understanding the operating principles of the language is better medicine for errors than pages of comma splices and fragments. .

Few, if any, students in your class would be happy to study grammar for its own sake. This book doesn’t suggest that. Everything in the book leads to the improvement of students’ ability to write with clarity and even grace. From the beginning, exercises make student writers think in specifics, work with examples, divide topics into parts and put the parts together logically. Grammar exercises direct students to turn vague words into clear ones, to make up sentences to illustrate various principles, to combine ideas with coherence and economy. Verb study leads to narrative, adjectives to description, and inter-sentence relationships to cause and effect explanation. Because the book starts with strong emphasis on the value of the concrete noun, even

your students’ first paragraphs should “say something” and hold their focus. As students work through the writing assignments, they will practice various techniques of development and Organization, the traditional rhetorical patterns and orders.

Finally, the proof of the effectiveness of the text will come in the paragraphs and essays it produces. |

To the Student This book’s aim is to improve your writing. Its focus shifts systematically from word to sentence to essay, and it includes all the operating principles (not ‘‘rules,’’ please note) of grammar and syntax that control punctuation in writing and produce clarity. You will probably work through this book from front to back at a gradually accelerating pace. There are certain ‘check points’ or diagnostic tests where you (and your instructor) can assess your own particular strengths and weaknesses and where, at your instructor’s suggestion, you may decide that you need to work all exercises or that you may skip some. The paragraphs and essays you write will also show directions your study should take. This book is carefully indexed so, if your work on an essay reveals a need for review of problems connected with verb and subject agreement or adverb usage or tense sequence, for example, you can find by yourself explanations and exercises. And for that kind of ‘independent’ study, answers for odd-numbered exercises are given at the back of the book. Unlike conventional rhetoric texts and ‘‘handbooks,”’ few of this

book’s exercises ask you to correct errors that the author has collected or concocted. You must correct your own errors, of course, but you will find that you will make fewer and fewer mistakes once you understand grammar and see the logic in punctuation and mechanics. And as knowledge frees you from anxiety about “‘rules,’’ you can develop a writing style of your own. By the end of the book or the end of the term, you a considerable distance toward a realistic goal: error-free, your writing will be clear and even graceful. writing will have become easy and fun, when the develops directly from what you want to say.

will have gone besides being The process of way you write

Words and the Sentence

Words and the Sentence WORDS The study of writing—of sentences, paragraphs, essays—might well begin with the smallest component of composition, the single word. One of the most influential writers of this century, Gertrude Stein,

declared her fascination with the importance of the single word:

| found that any kind of book if you read with glasses and somebody is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something.’ Gertrude Stein’s ‘‘sentence,’” however,

unintentionally illustrates the

desirability of logical syntax and punctuation for clarity’s sake since it lacks both!

Gertrude Stein is not the only one fascinated by words. Columnist James Kilpatrick writes of ‘‘silver verbs and golden nouns prepositions that fit their objects as precisely as a quarter fits a slot,’”? and ‘‘soft little adjectives with rounded corners.’’? Most English

grammar books recognize the importance of words and usually begin their study with ‘‘Parts of Speech,’’the eight traditional Categories into which

all words fall: nouns,

pronouns,

verbs, adjectives,

adverbs,

prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. Certainly, understanding these categories is absolutely essential. Just as no self-respecting grocer would shelve his soap with his string beans, so no English student would confuse the part-of-speech labels. Before reading more, test yourself on identifying parts of speech in the following exercise.

Directions:

What part-of-speech label would you give to each of the following words?

DrOOM: ne 2s e

friendly

Words and the Sentence

3

PIU ggpoe eh eco Sie

re

a SR?

gracefully

AYE)

he

pie ee ee ae

be

cae ee cee een eo ee: a Vee ee ee

between able

’

althOUmiit t=

ability

NOONE Ver ee se

their G8

fe

EEN

The words in the Diagnostic Test were carefully chosen so that each can have only one part-of-speech label, a situation not possible for all words. Open your dictionary to the first page of entries under A. Here are, among others, the words a (article, adjective), aardvark and Aaron (nouns), and aback (adverb). These words are similar to the ones in the test: they have one part-of-speech designation only.

Now turn to the first page-of entries under B in your dictionary. See babble labeled as both n. (noun) and v. (verb); baby as n., v., and adj. (adjective). Here in the dictionary entries, where each word exists apart from all other words, the word’s part-of-speech label is the first element in its definition. But you see that a word’s label is assigned according to the way, or ways, that the word can function in relation to other words in a sentence.

As a writer, you will find a dictionary most important as both text and tool. The following exercise will help you become acquainted with it.

Dictionary Exercise Directions:

Examples:

Investigate your own dictionary by choosing a word from the following list and studying its dictionary entry. Then organize some of the information given about it and present that information in a clear, coherent paragraph. Report what seems interesting to you about the word—that it can function as several parts of speech, that it has an interesting history (called its etymology), or that it has many synonyms or more than one entry. To follow customary practice, underline (to italicize) your word and any synonyms and put your definition of it (your own or the dictionary’s) in quotation marks.

1.

Hail has three entries in the dictionary. The first entry labels hail as a verb meaning “to welcome with acclaim’’ or “‘to summon”. .

Words and the Sentence

The origin of the word umbrella is a clue to its meaning. Its ancestor word is the Latin word umbra, meaning ‘‘shade.”’ The umbrella is protection from sun as well as rain. A second meaning of umbrella, however, has nothing to do with the idea of shade. .

age back caucus compare deal ease effect fence

figure finish grace

lift like lodge

grate

minute

stamp

hand head kick kind

pocket produce progress round

table tomato | worm wake

>

refuse seersucker seed

One Route to New Words

One way new words come into being is by the turning of initial letters into words: for example, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and scuba (self-contained, underwater breathing apparatus). A word produced by this process is called an acronym. If the combination of initials is unpronounceable, like FBI and CIA, the acronym will retain its capital letters. If the word is pronounceable, like scuba, the capitals may gradually disappear.

1

~=EXERCISE 1.1 Directions:

Explain the meaning of the following acronyms.

GNP, OMB, Radar

IRS

ZIP

AFL, ClO NATO ICBM VIP, BMOC VISTA

VFW WPONAUARWN>

OPEC NAACP AP UPS NOW, ERA SOS

Words and the Sentence

5

Here is a professional essay about words and their etymologies. 4

essay

“Paying through the nose” and other taxing phrases “Tax time’’ means,

basically, “touching time.’” The word ‘‘tax’’

comes from the Latin taxare, ‘‘to value by handling,’ which

1

in turn

derives from tangere, ‘‘to touch.’’ A deceptively gentle etymology, since most of us are likely to feel not so much ‘‘touched”’ as rather roughly handled by the Internal Revenue Service. To add verbal insult to financial injury, we are taxed most heavily upon such things as income from capital, things defined as ‘‘intangibles.’’ The word “intangible” also derives from tangere, and means ‘‘untouchable.’” Why, then, should our intangible assets be the most heavily taxed, our ‘‘untouch-

ables’”” the most rudely “‘touched’’? A sorry state of affairs, etymologically. When our capital is attacked, we feel it with particular anguish—

2

rather like being hit with a swift blow to the head. And so we should, for our ‘‘capital’’ is the ‘‘head’’ part, or chief part, of our assets. The word derives from the Latin word for ‘‘head,’’ caput, capitis, and the root capit- has given us a number of related terms. A capital letter is

larger than other letters, and stands at the head of the word; the capital of a country is its chief city; the capital of a column is its ornamental top; capital punishment used to mean only the loss of one’s head; the captain of a ship is its head officer; a chapter of a book is a section that has a new heading; to recapitulate an argument is to go again through its headings, or chief points. When our capital is taxed, then, we justly feel as though our heads had been none too gently touched. Most taxpayers are soft touches, and pay up, without protest or appeal. Even so, they are apt to complain of the ‘confiscatory’’ taxes that they pay. Yet all taxes, by definition, are ‘‘confiscatory.’’ To “confiscate’’ means ‘‘to seize private money for the public treasury.” The word comes from the Latin fiscus, ‘‘basket.’’ From the primary meaning of ‘‘basket,’’ fiscus had come, by Cicero’s time, to mean ‘‘the public treasury,”’ the central money basket. ‘The Fisk’’ is still the official

name of the treasury department in Scotland, and our term “fiscal policy” refers simply to how much money, through taxes, should be deposited in the government's central money basket, or fiscus. Those

most severely maimed by the government may prefer to fashion another etymology for “fiscal.’”’ If confiscatory rates cost an arm and a leg, may we not claim that “fiscal” policy is so named because it makes of us financial ‘‘basket cases’’? Henry Steele Commager, Forbes, 13 Apr. 1981, pp. 146-48. Reprinted by permission.

3

Words and the Sentence

Few people are optimistic enough to suppose that they will survive tax time untouched, or that they will escape ‘‘scot free’’—a phrase that is often misunderstood. We tend to think of it as meaning something like “free as a Scotsman.”” It conjures up the image of a dour and parsimonious Scot, determined to surrender nothing. In fact, ‘scot free’’ means simply ‘‘tax free,” from the Middle English word scot, “tax, contribution, debt, reckoning.’”’ And it is doubtful that many Scotsmen, however canny and frugal, get off scot free from the annual demands of their Fisk. Those taxpayers who denounce IRS agents as ‘‘scavengers’” may be

as knowledgeable as they are indignant. “Scavengers” originally meant “collectors of tolls,” or “‘inspectors,’’ from the Flemish scawuen, ‘‘to look at.”” Those officials performed a sort of customs service, inspecting

goods and levying an excise tax upon them. So when we accuse the IRS agents of being ‘‘scavengers,’’ they may justly reply that they are simply doing their job, ‘looking at’’ our forms, and “collecting tolls.’ ““Scavenger’’ was also the title later given to street cleaners. It’s certainly a more picturesque rubric than the pallid ‘sanitary engineer.’’ There was even a guild, or union, of scavengers. Its members took an oath, preserved in a 1419 legal text, the Liber Albus, which should perhaps be revived: ‘You shall swear that you shall diligently oversee that the pavements within your Ward be well and rightly repaired, and not made too high in nuisance of the neighbours; and that the ways, streets, and lanes are cleansed of dung and all manner of filth, for the decency of the City.” Instead of abusing IRS agents as ‘‘scavengers,’” we might instead praise them for cleaning up our messy returns. (So charitable an attitude should merit a deduction.) Nor, when they reject much of what we offer to their scrutiny, should

we

complain.

“Scrutinize,””

today,

means

simply ‘‘to inspect with care.’’ But originally it meant to pick through a trash pile: The word derives ultimately from the Latin scruta, ‘‘trash.’”’ The best thing to do is to hand in a return unlittered by trashy deductions, and hence proof against even the keenest scrutiny. Without some fairly imaginative deductions, the amount we end up

paying may seem

extortionate.

An exquisitely appropriate word.

To

“extort” money is to “twist it out,’”’ from the Latin ex, ‘out, away,” plus torquere, ‘‘to twist.’ (The past participle of the same verb is tortus, which gives us the English word “torture.’”) And when we come away from the torture of a tax audit, with every last drop of cash “twisted out” of us, we may justly complain of having been “put through the

wringer.”

Such extortionate payments are sometimes described as “paying through the nose.’” Why through the nose? Probably because such a loss seems like a spectacular flow of our very lifeblood, a hemorrhaging of our finances. Curiously, there was once an instrument of torture

Words and the Sentence

named the Scavenger’s Daughter, that exacted much the same penalty. The name has nothing to do with the other meanings of ‘scavenger’; instead, it is a colloquial slurring of the phrase “Skevington’s Daughter.’’ Skevington was Lieutenant of the Tower of London during the reign of Henry VIII, when the Tower was used as a prison. He invented a ghastly machine, jocularly known as his “daughter,” which bent a prisoner’s head between his knees, so that blood flowed from his nose and ears. Wretches in the embrace of ‘/Scavenger’s Daughter’ paid, brutally, through the nose. Besides the nosebleed, there is another possible derivation of the

phrase ‘‘pay through the nose,’ one that seems particularly apt at tax time. Supposedly, in the 9th century, the Danes imposed a poll (or ‘‘head’’) tax upon the conquered Irish: It was called a ‘nose tax.’” (Not really so strange a term; we still say either “to count heads” or ‘to count noses.’’) Those Irish who refused to pay were punished by having their nostrils slit—they ‘paid through the nose.” The story, on the face of it, seems unlikely. If true, it might suggest a primitive and overly literal application of an “excise’’ tax. An excise

10

Ta

tax is one usually inflicted by customs officials, and means “‘a cutting

away” (from the Latin excidere). The 9th-century Irish surely had just cause for complaint, if their poll taxes were in fact excised—literally— from their heads. Most polls (or “head counts’’) show that the majority of taxpayers simply pay the IRS whatever it demands. That way, we at least find peace. And so we should, since the verb “‘to pay’’ derives ultimately from pax, the Latin word for ‘‘peace.’’ The basic notion seems to be that in “paying” a creditor we ‘‘appease’’ him, and make ‘‘peace’”’ with him. Some of us are more bellicose, and unwilling to sue for peace on the terms of the IRS—that is, we don’t want to “pay.”’ A frequent recourse is to cheat. Not a good idea, as the government agents are familiar with most forms of cheating. They should be, since the word “cheat’’ originally took its meaning from the actions of the tax collectors themselves. ‘‘Cheat’’ is a shortened form of “escheat,’” which is the legal term for the reversion of property to the state. Escheators were once the government officials in charge of such confiscations: ‘‘Fiscus is a comyn sacke or bagge in which the Escheatour and rents gaderers put the comyn dette and custome that is payed to kynges,”’ according to a legal text of 1398. Apparently those Escheators were sometimes overly zealous in their duties, enriching themselves rather than the state. Hence, by the 17th century the verb ‘‘to cheat’’ had already taken on its present meaning of ‘‘to take wrongfully, deceitfully.”” The derivation of ““cheat’’ suggests one last recourse at tax time. If the extortionate scavengers at the IRS accuse you of cheating, you may plead that you are merely paying them back in their own coin, and that, by cheating, you are not so much fighting them as joining them. Try

12

ies

14

8

Words and the Sentence

it—it’s no harder than arguing with a guillotine. The worst they can do is confiscate your capital. Or, put more crudely, your head ends up in their basket.

O

EXERCISE

1.2

Directions:

There are some words in the preceding essay, ‘Paying through the nose... .,’” that may not be in your everyday spoken vocabulary. But they can be in your reading vocabulary. Look up in your dictionary any words in the following list that you are not familiar with. Note their pronunciation as well as their meaning.

anguish (paragraph 2) maimed (paragraph 3) parsimonious (paragraph 4) canny (paragraph 4) rubric (paragraph 6)

pallid (paragraph 6) colloquial (paragraph 9) jocularly (paragraph 9) OONAMRWH apt (paragraph 10) 10. literal (paragraph 11) 11. bellicose (paragraph 13) 12. recourse (paragraph 13) 13. zealous (paragraph 13) 14. guillotine (paragraph 14)

THE SENTENCE In spite of the interesting features of words considered singly, a word’s real importance lies in its use in the sentence. What is a sentence? One definition says, “A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought.” True, but the following

statement is also true: ‘A group of words, or even one word, may express a complete thought and yet not be a sentence!”

Imagine a situation, a scene: a character starts to leave the house

with a tennis racket, a baseball glove, or just the keys to the car. A second character says, ‘‘How about your homework?’

The first character responds and the conversation continues.

Words and the Sentence

9

“Later.” NN hat?’ “When | come home. O.K.2”” “Well, all right.’’

tone

Here are four complete thoughts. Their meaning is clear, their recognizable, and they are given the treatment customarily

accorded a sentence—a beginning capital and end punctuation. Yet none of the four is a sentence.

There is a second problem with the “‘complete thought’ definition. Here are some sentences: | am.

We do. The sun will. Begin.

These

sentences

hardly express

any thought

at all, let alone

a

“complete’’ one! Here are more sentences:

The desk eats. The chair runs. The bus thinks. These are worse still as ‘‘thoughts,’’” but they are sentences! So, working from these groups of words that | declare to be sentences, let us construct a workable definition of a sentence: A sentence is a group of words beginning with a capital letter, ending with sentence punctuation, and containing as its essential elements a verb and its expressed or understood subject. Furthermore, let us recognize that non-sentences (sentence fragments)

can be treated as sentences under special circumstances, particularly in conversation.

Sentence Punctuation

Sentence punctuation includes periods, exclamation points, or question marks. The first rule a writer learns is to use one of these to end each sentence. Failure to end a sentence creates confusion and an

error called a run-on

or run-together sentence—more

accurately

called fused sentences.

Error:

They were as happy as possible under the circumstances no one could have been happier.

10

Words and the Sentence

Correction:

They were as happy as possible under the circumstances. No one could have been happier. or

They were as happy as possible. Under the circumstances no one could have been happier. It is, of course, permissible to join two sentences by use of the punctuation mark semicolon. (No capital letter is used to begin the sentence following the semicolon.) Two sentences may also be joined with a coordinating conjunction:

and, but, yet, or, nor, for, or so.

Unless the two sentences are very short, the conjunction situation is preceded by a comma.

in this

In the sort of shorthand this book will use, a sentence will look like this: Sov; Sv? S v! S VAST.

S v, and (but, yet, or, etc.) s.v.

So much for an overview. A closer look might raise some questions. What is a subject? Obviously it is closely related to the verb, It is one essential half of the sentence. Furthermore, it is always a noun or the noun’s substitute, the pronoun, or a word group functioning as a noun. Next question: what is a noun? But before we continue, take the following diagnostic exam. It tests matters concerning the noun that will be considered in Chapters 2 through 5.

I.

Underline all nouns in the following sentence. The accident left the girl with a fear of driving.

Underline all nouns and label them as concrete or abstract. The ants were a minor annoyance easily offset by the pleasures of the chocolate cake. | Underline all nouns and label them as general or specific.

Words and the Sentence

11

An activity such as a party or a picnic can change the mood of a person from gloom to happiness. Substitute specific words for general ones. A worker cannot work without equipment. Il.

Rewrite each sentence, omitting the use of the word of or the

phrase of the.

Ill.

IV.

A.

The efficiency of the employee humor of the boss.

produced

the good

B.

Show me the house of the Stephenses.

C.

Rights of women are a current concern of everybody.

D.

The noise of the sirens was deafening.

E.

The apartment of Jane and Jim is very small.

Rewrite each sentence, changing all nouns to plural form and making any other changes needed. A. The fly crawls across the tomato in the box.

B.

The man has sharpened his knifé.

C.

Achurch often undergoes a crisis.

Insert needed capitals, hyphens, italics, quotation marks, and apostrophes in the following sentences. A. Almost everybody knows Shakespeares tragedy Hamlet and a couple of Robert Frosts poems—stopping by woods on a snowy evening, for example, and the road not taken.

12

Words and the Sentence

It is sad to see a twenty two year old girl with the mind of a ten year old. Sometime this fall between halloween and thanksgiving day, | intend to take my english springer spaniel, my fishing tackle, and my sleeping bag and go up to tate mountain for a long weekend vacation. Its a silly reason, but | bought the album because its cover has a pretty scene on it.

Insert appropriate articles (a or an) in the following sentences. os

College offers ___ student ____ opportunity that he can get nowhere else. I'd rather have ___ cold than ____ earache. We must take ____ history course and ____ physical education every quarter.

Vi.

hour of

Illustrate the following grammatical terms by including an example of each in a phrase or sentence. Underline the illustrated term. Example:

a noun The cat sneezed. a verb adjective adverb preposition a modifier an appositive

a proper noun a common noun *@), num OC) eek oo © 2 a pronoun

13

Words and the Sentence

NOTES Z

1.

Gertrude Stein, Geographical History Vintage-Random House, 1973), p. 151.

of America

(1936;

rpt.

New

York:

2.

James Kilpatrick, ‘Tools of the Writing Art,”” Daily News, Athens, GA., 15 Jan. 1980. Sec. 1, p. 6, col. 4.

3.

James Kilpatrick, ‘‘Hail Chief,’’ Daily News, Athens, GA., 19 July 1978. Sec. 1, p. ARIGOleiGe

The Noun and the Paragraph

15

The Noun and the Paragraph WHAT IS A NOUN? .

N

The usual definition of a noun as the name of a person, place, or thing seems to break down when applied to such words as lot, side, way, state, worth, relationship. The dictionary labels them nouns, but they

seem not to refer to things. So let’s expand the definition of noun a bit: A noun is the name of a person, place, thing, or thought. Many nouns—easily recognizable as nouns—are concrete; that is, the people, places, and things they refer to can be seen, touched, smelled, heard, tasted. They exist in space. Examples of concrete

nouns include bush, bell, garbage, apple, path, Peachtree Street, girl, Professor World.

Jones,

Huckleberry

Finn,

library,

Eckerd’s,

and

Disney

.

Other nouns refer to things that cannot be apprehended by any sense. These nouns are abstract and refer to ideas, states, conditions, qualities, attributes, and concepts. Beauty, happiness, truth, mood, size, strength, and lot, side, way, state, worth, and relationship, which

we listed above, are examples. Notice, too, that the word thought is itself an abstraction, and the word thing (defined as ‘‘entity,’’ ‘‘object’’) must be considered concrete.

Both kinds of nouns—concrete and abstract—can be general or specific and degrees of either. Fish, for example, is a concrete word

but it is general. refer to specific general. Sadness Some synonyms grief, or despair. Measles,

Trout or bass or salmon are specific nouns as they kinds of fish. The word mood is abstract and also is still abstract but much more specific than mood. for sadness are even more specific: sorrow, regret, Health is both abstract and general, as is disease.

a specific disease,

is still an

abstraction,

a word

for a

condition, though its symptoms are surely concrete—small red spots, hard and dry cough, and watery eyes. Color is also both abstract and general. Blue, for example, is a specific abstraction. One can perceive it only as it becomes part of something concrete—a dress, or eyes, sky, or can of paint.

16

17

The Noun and the Paragraph

A writer ‘‘sees’’ concretely. He transforms ‘‘life’’ (abstract and general) into ‘living things’’ (concrete and general) and then moves toward greater and greater specificity.

vegetable

1 carrot

tree = grass_—Ss

V oak

V fescue

animal

man

J

1

chipmunk

six-foot-two, fortythree-year-old male Chicago bus driver

This kind of thinking, the ability to translate an abstraction something concrete, is vital for a writer. In your own writing you want to try for the clarity and life that come from concreteness specificity. Practice thinking concretely. Let ‘‘delay’’ become a

into will and flat

tire, an ‘‘accomplishment,”” an A on a test paper; for ‘‘nervousness,”’

feel clammy hands; for ‘quality,’ see price tag or threads to the inch. Then remember this good advice for all writers: support all generalizations with specific detail. Illustrate abstractions concretely whenever possible.

NOUNS EXERCISE Directions:

Consider the definition of abstract and concrete words and label items in this list as abstract or concrete.

(0g = eee Ate ee ee nee eee ee

i eee ee eee SN eer ee ee IS eee ee eee eer (eae ere eee ee eee eatin as = ee

cup friendship.

material speed motorcycle rain Keateseee

EXERCISE Directions:

2.1

2.2

Judge these words on the basis of their degree of specificity and label them

1. most general;

2. more

specific; 3. still more

specific. There may be more than one word in each group that represents the same degree of specificity.

O

18

The Noun and the Paragraph

Example:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

dog

Labrador retriever

3

animal

4

1

mammal

2

beauty physical attribute quality aspirin medicine pain-killer Bayer toothache discomfort pain feeling dollar ~< money Currency . sport activity gymnastics tumbling poetry literature sonnet lyric beverage wine Burgundy liquid silver mineral natural resource metal cards contest bridge game eo left tackle athlete lineman football player

EXERCISE

2.3

Directions:

Label each of these words as abstract or concrete. Then make each more specific by adding one or more related words.

Example:

weather (abstract) rain, sun, Snow (specific)

size (abstract) 5'10”, pound, acre (specific) shoe (concrete) oxford, sneaker, pump (specific)

1.

plant

6.

aperture

2. 3.

attitude ingredient

7. 8.

Waterway comfort

4. 5.

population trouble

9. 10.

faculty goal

EXERCISE

2.4

Directions:

Make the following list of general words more specific.

item

article utensil supplies assortment junk container building dwelling

notions

pet

color cutlery furnishings furniture clothes luxury toiletries flower

pest activity game occupation Career opportunity disability disease

The Noun and the Paragraph place

19

fruit

community

necessity

cereal

environment sundries

offense

vegetable meat

dry-goods

animal

crime > reward

punishment

SENTENCES A logical progression of thought in a sentence is a move from general to specific. For example: Nancy’s residence (general) is a two-room apartment in an old Victorian house on the corner of Boulevard and Park Place (specific). The comic hero (general)—Falstaff, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, for

example (specific)—arouses -mixed feelings like scorn or even disgust, but often also affection (specific).

EXERCISE Directions:

2.5

©

Make the following sentences clearer either by adding some specific words or by substituting specific words for general ones.

Everything is in its place. The place is full of apparatus. The closet and drawers hold many items. The hobbyist needs materials. The vehicle offers comforts. Noise fills the environment. The campus offers many places for students to work. Household pests carry germs. Dieters must avoid fattening foods. Many occasions call for celebrations. aaga ee eg ON Ce s

—

PARAGRAPHS A paragraph, example:

too,

moves

logically from

general to specific.

For

His aim in coming to college is to prepare himself for a career (general) as teacher and coach (specific). He intends to teach social studies at the junior high level and to coach soccer and baseball (more specific).

The Noun and the Paragraph

20

TV commercials use many devices to catch a viewer's attention (general)—tunes, cartoons, pretty girls, celebrities (specific). Alka Seltzer lures potential buyers with Sammy Davis, Jr. and promises

an end to indigestion with ‘‘Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz! Oh what a

relief it is!” (more specific). A basic paragraph pattern, then, is one generalization supported by as many sentences containing specific’ details as are necessary to make that opening generalization clear.

Notice that if your details are specific, your paragraphs are clear. So check each paragraph for clarity and specificity. Are most of your nouns concrete? Are all generalizations immediately explained by specifics?

For example, if you said one pleasure is the weather (abstract), do you go on immediately to make your point clear?

Days are warmer (generalization), but not above a comfortable— seventy degrees (specific). Nights are just cool enough for a sweater outdoors and a blanket on the bed (more specifics).

21

The Noun and the Paragraph

Notice also that if you follow the pattern, your paragraph will automatically possess unity. Check each paragraph in the preceding

“Topics for Writing’ for this quality.

|

Paragraph 1:

Does each sentence after the first either list or describe some pleasure? Do you avoid switching your view to any of the possible drawbacks of the season or time?

Paragraph 2:

Does each sentence describe a feature of the toy that would be entertaining, interesting, or exciting to a child? Do you avoid talking about its cost or educational value or such matters that would concern the adult only?

Paragraph 3:

Does each sentence list and describe in order a process? Are you careful to hold to your topic—what the person you watched did—not what somebody should do in the same situation?

Paragraph 4:

Is each detail you note about yourself at the earlier age paralleled by a detail of you at this time?

EXERCISE Directions:

2.6

Examine the following brief paragraph. Circle all the specific words; underline all the general words. Judge the paragraph on its specificity.

As a person, | am different in three aspects from what | was as a high-schooler. First, my appearance is much different. Then | was thin, even skinny, and almost six feet tall. Now | am taller by two inches and heavier by twenty-two pounds. Secondly, besides getting a high school diploma, | have, since high school, gained knowledge in fields in which | now know | have skill and talent. As a high-schooler, | had no idea of my future career plans. Now | am on my way toa decision. Finally, | have gained independence. In high school | always followed the crowd. Now | am my own man.

EXERCISE Directions:

2.7

Check the following paragraph for unity. Draw aline through any sentence or part of a sentence that violates the basic unity of the paragraph, that is, that fails to support the central idea of the paragraph: What is good about Monday?

22

The Noun and the Paragraph

The pleasures of Monday are many. It is the start of a new week, the first of seven days to do all the things | didn’t do the week before—make the phone call, write the letter, clean the closet, catch

up on the reading, start again the diet and exercise regimen. | feel good on Monday after the relaxation of the weekend, unless the weekend has not been relaxing. If | have been away or have partied all weekend, and particularly if | have stayed home over Sunday night and have driven back to school early Monday morning, | will be exhausted on Monday. | can’t keep my eyes open in any class; just the thought of all | have to do is exhausting. But on most Mondays | am rested. | had time on Sunday to sunbathe and roll my hair, do all my laundry, even sew some rips and tears. So | look good on Monday, too, neater and more wide-awake than | will be on any other day of the week to come.

A Skeleton Paragraph The following paragraph is unified. The four supporting sentences all support the initial generalization. But it is a very weak paragraph in its lack of specific detail. The supporting sentences are worded

in very

general terms. One often takes a part-time job in order to supplement other income. (1) Many men and women work part time after a long, hard day to help get the budget ends to meet. (2) Often non-working members of the family find short-hour jobs so they can help the breadwinner build the budget so certain needed items may be purchased. (3) There are people who take part-time jobs so they might have money to more or less throw away. (4) Then there are also people who place the money received from their part-time job in a savings account so it will be there in the future for needs or emergencies.

Keep the opening sentence. Rewrite the rest of the paragraph by these instructions: Sentence 1:

Leave the sentence as it is, but let it introduce one or

more sentences of specific detail.

Sentence 2:

Rewrite the sentence, substituting specifics for its general words.

Sentence 3:

Rewrite the last part of the sentence (‘to more or less

The Noun and the Paragraph

23

throw away’’), substituting three specific actions, each beginning with the word to. Sentence 4:

Rewrite

the sentence,

adding,

within

dashes,

specific needs and three specific emergencies. sentence will look like this:

three

The

. . . §O it will be there in the future for needs— le —or emergencies— , or

THE TOPIC SENTENCE Opening sentences or “‘initial generalizations’ for paragraphs are often labeled “topic sentences.’’ Such a sentence controls the paragraph. When it comes first, it is a summary in advance. Not all paragraphs have or need a topic sentence, and not all topic sentences are first sentences. But an opening topic sentence is a help for the reader and a safeguard for the beginning writer.

EXERCISE Directions:

te

2.8

Supply a topic sentence for each of these paragraphs.

He locks his keys in his car and loses his book the day before the exam. He forgets dates and deadlines. He misses planes, kick-offs, and his girl’s birthday. When he has no umbrella, it starts to rain. When he tries on new shoes, his sock has a hole in

it. He spills drinks; he trips over doorsills; he leaves a pen in the pocket of a shirt that he launders. And he finds himself caught by signs he did not see: ‘‘No Checks,” “Wrong Way.”

DZ:

‘‘No Parking,’ ‘No Exit,’’

The shag carpet is thick and soft. Sofa and chairs are covered in quilted chintz—plump and padded. A low table holds a variety

of magazines and a copper pot full of deep gold zinnias. A fire burns quietly in a large fireplace. The room smells faintly of wood smoke and lemon furniture polish. 3.

Every day the same foods appear on the breakfast table— juice, cereal, egg, bacon, toast and jelly, coffee.

Furthermore,

O

24

The Noun and the Paragraph

within this basic menu the juice is inevitably orange, grapefruit, or tomato. The egg is boiled or scrambled or fried. The jelly is apple or grape, both marked ‘‘imitation.’” Most people eat breakfast in the same place every day—either the kitchen, the cafeteria, or the neighborhood waffle shop. And for many, breakfast is a solitary meal. When schedules do match, however, and two do breakfast together, conversation is invariably thin since most people are sleepy—or grouchy—or hurried—some even harried—or buried in headlines, sports pages, comics, and crosswords.

— S e —

Without going to school, all robins know when and how to build nests. A turtle buries its eggs in the sand without being instructed by its parents. Caterpillars know they have to make cocoons, and butterflies know how to fly. When frightened, ostriches bury their heads in the dirt and opossums play dead. Bears instinctively know when to hibernate and also when to emerge. Roosters crow at the right time, pointers point, and baby ducks unerringly head for the water. The success seems to be a know-it-all. The failure knows he doesn’t. He will never act superior and look down on the other fellow from a height of straight A’s. He recognizes the feeling of another who also faces a red F on a paper. He understands that there is very little comfort in such pronouncements as, “‘It’s only a midterm grade. You’ve still got the final,’’ or ‘Half the class failed, you know.” The experienced failure will most likely not say anything except, ‘‘Let’s go get a beer.”” The success is likely to guard his secrets. The friend who has failed now and again but has survived will have learned some things he’ll be glad to pass on.

e

Introducing the Verb, and Continuing the Paragraph

Introducing the Verb, and Continuing the Paragraph The noun is one half of the sentence; the verb is the other, The verb is

more important in one way because a verb can be a sentence all by itself. For example, each of the following commands has an “understood” pronoun (you) as its subject, so that the verb is all that’s needed: Run. Come. Go. Try.

Still “missing’’ a subject, a sentence consisting of verb plus verb modifiers sounds perfectly normal: Come back soon. Give to the United Way. Run for your health’s sake, Go away.

No lone noun or noun plus modifiers can be a sentence.

WHAT

IS A VERB? A verb is far harder to define than a noun is. It seems easy to say, “A

verb is a word that expresses action, for example, walk, speak.’ But

not all actions are easily recognizable as such. The action of kick is

perfectly clear. Not so the “action” of compare, conclude, know, have. So in defining verb, we must first expand our concept of action. Then because many verbs describe no action at all, we must allow our definition to cover words such as js, becomes, seems that express not action, but being or condition.

While difficulty in defining a verb is not very import ant, difficulty

in recognizing one could be damaging. Fortunately, howev er, most of you have no difficulty. There is no other part of speec h like a verb, and you have used verbs naturally with nouns in sente nces since you began to talk.

But to be sure you can identify verbs, chec k yourself with the following diagnostic test.

26

27:

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

Directions:

Circle the words that are not verbs.

worry besides

floor side

bed grace

away money weather made pencil

good own only mood

pair serene until move

are’

but excess your against much police by train toll union has point inch ink

man mine quarter sudden house able

An easy test for a word as verb is to imagine it with a preceding noun as the heart or core of a sentence.

A second check of your verb. understanding: practice producing verbs from your own vocabulary.

EXERCISE Directions:

Example:

3.1

List twenty nouns, with articles if you wish. Now add a verb to each noun and complete the resulting sentence by adding whatever seems needed. Underline the subject-noun once and the verb twice. The bus stops at that corner.

The sun rises in the east. Jealousy destroys a friendship.

EXERCISE Directions:

3.2

Do you need more practice? From a paragraph in any book or newspaper, find the verbs. To be certain of the designation, either find the sentence subject or try the word you call a verb with a subject (noun or pronoun). If the combination SV makes sense, you can be sure you have correctly identified a verb.

TWO-PART AND TWO-PLUS-PART VERBS As you produce verbs and find verbs in these exercises, you will probably use and identify verbs that do not operate singly. The verb

28

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

that carries the meaning may be joined by a verb with less meaning —called a helping verb, or auxiliary. Be aware of these verbs. Use them naturally, and be sure to ‘‘find’’ them when they are present. Several examples of helping verbs are am, is, are, was, were, have, has, had, will, can, do. Two-part helpers include have been, has been, had been, will be,

Remember, too, that a two-part verb may be divided. An adverb may come between the parts. V

Adv

V

John has recently bought a new car. V Adv V A good friend will not tell a secret. A question often divides a verb by putting the subject between verb parts.

Vv you V come for dinner tomorrow?

Will V

Were

V.

they driving on the expressway?

Notice that verbs that end in ing must always have a helping verb. They can never be sentence or ‘‘predicating’” verbs by themselves.

Not:

Harry being helpful to the director.

But:

Harry was being helpful to the director.

or Harry was helpful to the director.

Not: But:

Jane having heard the weather report. Jane had heard the weather report.

Not: But:

The children splashing happily in the pool. The children are splashing (or were splashing or splash or splashed) in the pool.

A verb’s degree of usefulness for a writer often depends on its degree of meaning. The “state of being’ verbs have little meanin g; they are merely convenient. Remember Tarzan’s line: ““Me Tarzan; you Jane.” Tarzan came right to the point. With no loss of meaning at

all, he could leave out those small, weak verbs am and are. They are civilized refinements that we can’t leave out, but as writers we

should profitably aim to use them as little as possible.

Most useful to writers are the strong verbs, those that describe action. And some of those are stronger than others since a verb, like a noun, can describe its action either generally or specifically.

29

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

The verb move, for example, gives only a general idea of motion. There are many specific ways for a person or a thing to move. Walk is a more specific version of move, though it is rather general. Look at the walking. Does the person stumble, shuffle, limp, creep, hurry, trot,

lope, stagger, mince, or tiptoe? The word say also does its job well if the speaker is emotionless. But there are many more specific possibilities: the speaker perhaps murmurs, mutters, whispers, babbles, or blurts out.

shouts,

scolds,

jabbers,

stammers,

EXERCISE 3.3 Directions:

Add as many ‘more specific verbs as possible to each of these general ones. :

Examples:

make:

build, construct, put together, manufacture, fabricate, fashion,

compose,

create,

devise,

shape,

cook, sew, sculpt have:

hold, own, possess, cherish, keep, preserve

cook sew write sit

shut

get strike eat drink think

:

EXERCISE Directions:

3.4

Modifiers can add specificity as they add meaning to words. Adjectives modify and add meaning to nouns; adverbs modify verbs, telling where the action of the verb takes place, or when,

or how, or why, or to what degree. Choose any eight verbs from Exercise 3.3—either the original verbs or some of those you added—and add to each an adverb modifier.

Example:

run around

recently buy splash happily barely move

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

30

USING DETAILS Descriptive and Narrative

(J

EXERCISE

3.5

Directions:

Nouns and the words that modifysthem (adjectives) become descriptive details when the writer wants to picture in words a thing, place, or person. List the descriptive details that you find in the following paragraphs.

Le

There—in Chester, | think—I saw the prettiest church I’ve ever seen. It was on a hill with an ancient graveyard beside it and its white clapboard walls rose higher than any church walls | have seen outside European cathedrals. The old bubbly window-panes were framed by green shutters; the slender steeple rose from a fretwork of old, lichened, winter-bare tree branches. | had to get

out and tiptoe in the sanctuary for a moment, and that’s how | happened to notice the little sign listing the hour of services and, incidentally, that the church was founded in 1738." 2

The press room—a cold cavernous enclosure which harbored discarded Christmas decorations and office furniture—was impres-

sively well-populated. And proved to be more interesting than the dance floor itself: there were chicken wings and cheese and crackers and paté and booze and ice-sculpture swans and a chunky woman in an irridescent knee-length cocktail! dress with a streaming silver sash. Oh, and a rail-thin local TV celeb wearing second-skin nylon pants and an expression of extreme insecurity.? Bs

An old man, a customer for about six years, is draped in a white bib covered with hair clippings, his mouth is closed, and his eyes are squinted in a tight, wry expression of content. His cheecks are pale, scruffy, and hollow, and his lips are pursed. In fact, his lips seem exaggerated, like his pointed chin, which sticks out far. When he sat down, the man grunted, ‘/Raise the sideburns

up some.’’ But now, relaxed against the back of the chair, he is quiet and almost asleep.?

31

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

If the thing or person you are describing moves or if there is action in the scene, your descriptive details will use verbs and may be called narrative detail since description of action is called narrative.

EXERCISE 3.6 Directions:

The following paragraph combines, as most descriptions do, descriptive (static) details and narrative details. List the details in the paragraph and label them as descriptive or narrative.

| took the ball and turned it in my hands and suddenly there was in my nose the smell of it. It is the smell which only a football or a baseball glove possesses. . . . Standing there with the leather aroma of it in my nose, | could remember old games and scenes. | could feel again the tensing in the line before the ball was snapped; the sudden lunge forward, the twisting rasp of canvas pants and the sound of hard, almost sobbing breathing, as we strove to open a hole, a break through. | could hear again the smothered curses and could feel the hot wet wool of a jersey rub deep in some raw scratch across the neck.é

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

32

Notice the mixture of narrative and descriptive details in the following professional essay, a news story.

@SSEl Indicators of Spring Abound 1

2 3

4

Oo

6

Ridgefield, Conn. (AP)—Spring may be a few weeks late; it may even disappear completely when the sun goes down and the wind moves around to the north, but contrary to what the thermometer says, it has definitely arrived around here. The indicators are everywhere. The 9:30 morning jogger—you can almost schedule them like trains around here—has shed her winter cocoon of quilted parka and leg warmers and goes flashing by in fetchingly slitted track shorts and skin tight tank top. The neighborhood snow birds have arrived back from Florida with enviable tans, sacks of grapefruit, and tedious tales of how they went swimming in the ocean on Christmas Day. The snowplow driver is now mending potholes. You can twirl the TV knob and get your choice of seasonal Associated Press news feature, ‘Indicators of Spring Abound,” Daily News, Athens, GA., 26 Apr. 1979. Sec. 1, p. 10, col. 1. Reprinted by permission of the Associated Press.

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

sports—hockey, basketball, baseball, golf—but for a few blessed weeks no football. The sleds and sacks of salt in front of the hardware store have been replaced by bamboo rakes and sacks of fertilizer. The library has scheduled a seminar on crab grass. > An elderly couple up the road claims to have spotted the first purple martin, the first Frisbee in a flower bed, the first income tax refund check, and the first ice cream truck of the season all on the Same morning. A kite has flowered in the big sugar maple at the corner.

The Little League is looking for umpires. A vagrant Sunday afternoon breeze brought the distinct aroma of a charcoal scorched steak from a nearby back yard. The back pages of the Sunday paper are sprouting with ads for summer camps designed for kids who want to lose weight, master tennis, learn French, catch up on their grades, play in a woodwind

33

7. 8

9 10 Td

2

orchestra, or conquer stuttering.

The hills and dales of exurbia have been transformed into a vast penal colony, a gulag of domestic drudgery. Everywhere you look the inmates are painting, hammering, hoeing, digging, caulking, shingling, tilling, heaving, hauling, roofing, fencing, bricking, mulching, cementing, insulating, spring cleaning.

USING EXAMPLES As you developed paragraphs in Chapter 2, your supporting details, descriptive and narrative, were often “examples.” (An example is a

13

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

‘“sample,’’ one of may possibilities from a longer list.) You might have taken the time to list a// the pleasures of the season, al! the features of the toy, but more likely you gave a representative list instead of a complete one; you used examples. How does a ‘‘detail’” become an ‘‘example’’?

The front of the Fine Arts Building laoks like an inside-out umbrella as swept-back wings of concrete become a roof overhanging the entrance. The front of Park Hall is dignified by tall, white columns. Under the building’s roof line, traditional classical molding tops the red brick of the walls. The new Education Building is a yellow brick cube with narrow slits for windows. These sentences contain descriptive details. They will become examples as the writer adds a controlling sentence—a generalization, a ‘‘topic sentence’’—either in the beginning or at the end, to pull them all together into a paragraph: The University buildings exhibit a variety of architectural styles. Or we may start with the generalization:

The power of growing things is amazing. Add examples—this time a narrative: A small daffodil bulb, no more than two inches in diameter, can

push its delicate green leaves up through earth, gravel, and finally a macadam driveway. Soon a yellow flower will nod above its black, hard bed.

The paragraph cannot stop here, however; one example is not enough. With just one example, the topic of the paragraph has changed from ‘‘growing things’ to ‘a daffodil.’” You must add more examples to make this one an example! Here are the needed additional examples:

As a young pine grows, its roots can pierce a strong clay sewer pipe.

A thin strand of ivy can work its way between bricks and under shingles. It can separate the steps from the front porch, divide a retaining wall in two, and carve a channel so the roof will leak.

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

35

Signaling Examples Sometimes

you will want to signal your use of example by such

phrases as for example, for instance, that is, and such as. Consider the

following cautions in using these phrases. 1.

Omit the signal phrases if possible. Notice that in the preceding two paragraphs they would not be needed. The relationship of examples to the topic sentence is quite clear without any signal.

2.

When possible, insert for instance or for example in the sentence instead of beginning the sentence with the signal. Instead of: Try:

3.

For example, tennis is a sport whose popularity has increased dramatically recently. Tennis, for example, is a sport whose... .

Avoid whenever possible a sentence that begins, ‘“An example (Sao -

Instead of: Try:

4.

An example of a dead-end job is delivering papers. Delivering papers is one dead-end job. or Such a job as delivering papers leads to a dead end. or Delivering papers is an example of a dead-end job.

Avoid always the mixed construction of An example (noun) is when . . . (adverb clause).

(See Chapter 8 for further explanation of adverb clauses.) Instead of:

5.

6.

An example of an embarrassing moment is when you . Try: An example ... is the time when YOUR st. or It is embarrassing, for example, to forget your best friend’s name as you introduce her.

Avoid praising yourself for choosing ‘a good example,” ‘‘a fine example,” ‘‘the best example,’ or “a prime example.” Be careful not to let a signal phrase lead to a sentence fragment (a wedd

non-sentence).

Not:

The organ played everybody's favorite hymns. Such as “Amazing Grace,’”” and “The Old Rugged Cross.”’

36

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

But: 7.

The organ played everybody's favorite hymns, such as “Amazing Grace” and “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Be sure you follow rules for sentence punctuation signaling an example introduces a sentence.

Not:

if a phrase

Did you ever keep track of the trips you and your car take over a year’s time, for example, you would probably list more than a hundred trips to the grocery

store.

;

But:

Did you ever keep track of the trips you and your car take over a year’s time? For example, you would probably list more than a hundred trips to the grocery store. Better: Did you ever keep track of the trips you and your car take over a year’s time? You would list, for example, more than a hundred trips to the grocery store. Note that for example, for instance, and that is are interrupters (adverbs) and therefore must be set off by commas. Such as acts like a preposition and so what follows this phrase may not be cut off from it by a comma. Such as may be preceded by a comma if it introduces non-essential material (the rule that applies always to appositives and modifiers).

Flowers such as those brides carry and those funerals call for must be durable and firm-stemmed. Fragile flowers, such as gardenias, which turn brown quickly, and daisies with limber stems, are best avoided in arrangements for wedding bouquets and funerals.

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

37

POSITIONING THE TOPIC SENTENCE A writer frequently uses one or more narrative examples as evidence to ‘‘orove’”’ the truth of a generalization, as we have seen. Just as writers can control the specificity and clarity of the examples they use, so too

can they control the positioning of their generalization, their topic sentence. The position of the topic sentence within a paragraph can

vary widely. The following paragraphs show three ways a writer can place the topic sentence. Topic: A new broom sweeps clean.

Paragraph 1:

Several examples and topic sentence at end.

The truth of the old proverb was apparent. The new housekeeper straightened all the cupboards her first week on the job. Then she had all of the mattresses

38

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

turned and the curtains washed. The new teacher declared so many rules and assigned so much homework that from the day she arrived, not a student dared

cut class. The new department head rearranged his office, fired the secretary,

revised

the budget,

and

reorganized the work schedule. A new broom certainly sweeps clean. Paragraph 2:

One extended example and topic sentence at beginning.

As a new broom sweeps clean, the new head turned the department upside down. He changed all the pictures in his office, requisitioned a new, larger desk, and added an Oriental rug and a sofa. He

reviewed the office staff, hired four and fired three, and gave everybody raises. He ordered the latest office machines and locks for the supply cabinets. The pleasantest change was a new work schedule. Before he published it, he consulted people. The new schedule reflected everybody’s preference for hours, lunch times, and time off.

Paragraph 3:

Brief examples, one longer example, topic sentence in mid-position.

New presidents can choose new cabinets. New coaches may throw away old playbooks. New home-

owners carport clean. Spring

re-paint and wallpaper, add a pool, or turn a into a garden room. So a new broom sweeps Nature provides such a broom every year. turns the world bright green and shiny, sweep-

ing away dry, brown fields and dull, cloudy skies, hiding winter’s trash with flowers.

Introducing the Verb and Continuing the Paragraph

NOTES Ae Celestine Sibley, ‘‘Nice Surprise: New Jersey Is Charming,’’ Constitution, Atlanta, GA., 1 Feb. 1980. Sec. B, p. 1, col. 1. Used by permission. 2.

Michelle Green, ‘‘Disco Decadence,” Constitution, Atlanta, GA., 1 Feb. 1980.

Sec. B, p. 1, col. 4. Used by permission. 3.

Jeffrey Scott, ‘Hair Razing!’’ Atlanta Weekly, 25 May 1980, pp. 6-7. Used by permission.

a

Ralph McGill, ‘‘A Perfume of Reminiscence,” Constitution, Atlanta, GA., 2 Nov. 1963. Sec. A, p. 1, col. 1. Used by permission.

39

ih:

e& ne

este

Oy

More About Nouns.

41

More About Nouns A noun has four distinguishing characteristics:

1.

Its meaning affects its form in two ways: a. Proper nouns are capitalized. b. Plural forms differ from singulars.

2.

Most nouns can be accompanied by an article. Nouns can be modified by adjectives.

4.

Two nouns can join to function as one.

>

CAPITALIZATION When a noun is the name of a person or thing, it begin s with a capital letter and is called a proper noun. An uncapitalized noun is called a common noun. The following list contains examp les of proper nouns: England English America Atlanta Georgia

the United States the Emerald Isle Clayton Street the Oconee River Memorial Hall the First Presbyterian Sunday School Building the U.S. Post Office the North the Middle West the Deep South Boy Scouts

Kleenex Mathematics 105 The Red Badge of Courage

42

World War Two the Fifties the Gold Rush

the Age of Reason the Fourth of July

Thanksgiving Day Passover Pentecost

Thursday September God the Trinity the Bible Genesis Islam the Koran

Holiday Inn Chevrolet the Constitution “The Three Bears’ |

Jane

Mother Howard Grandfather Indian Negro Queen Mab

Captain Hook - Vice-President Bush R. H. Macy and

Company, Inc. The Wednesday

Study Club the Chamber of Commerce the Board of Regents the Democratic Party Common Cause Baptists Bufferin Coca-Cola

the Gettysburg Address

43

More About Nouns

Note that some of these same words used differently become common nouns: my mother a common cause for war a street address

a democratic state north of the river the grandfather of the vice-president of the club

Notice in the following examples that the matter of capitalization is a matter of sense: Girl is different from Jane.

A mother is different from

A jack is a car tool.

Mother.

A bob is an action or a haircut or a kind of sled. A general direction or the ~

point of the compass is south.

Jack is a man’s name. Bob is short for Robert. The section of the country is

called the South.

The words captain, pastor, professor are just uncapitalized common nouns until they become part of a person’s name: Professor Brown,

Captain

nearly so bread do example, Sunbeam

Smith,

Pastor

King.

Products

that are standard

EXERCISE Directions:

Example:

or

such as aspirin, toothpaste, peanut butter, chewing gum, or not become part of a name. They are not capitalized: for Crest toothpaste, Wrigley’s gum, Peter Pan peanut butter, bread, Bayer aspirin. 4.1

From the list of capitalized examples on the first page of this chapter, name the kinds of words that are capitalized and give additional examples for each kind. Names of countries are capitalized: From list: England, the Emerald Isle, America, the United States. Additions: France, Germany, the Soviet Union.

PLURALS When the noun means more than one of a thing, when it changes from singular to plural, it changes its form in different ways.

44

More About Nouns

The simplest change is the addition of the letter s: girl becomes girls Some nouns change according to historical practice: man mouse

men mice

Some change by a rule concerning their spelling. a. Y changes to i and adds es. : lady ladies

b.

c.

d. e.

a.

sky O adds es. potato

skies potatoes

Negro

Negroes

But these rules do not always apply. Words ending with a vowel before the y add s with no other change. boys monkeys And some words ending in o do not add es. solo memo trio Eskimo And for some the dictionary gives a choice, either s or es: zero zeros or zeroes halo halos or haloes Some words change to make the plural more easily pronounceable than it would be if it added s only. business businesses box dish church

boxes dishes churches

Notice that the plural es ending adds a syllable to these

words ending in s, x, sh, ch.

b.

size edge college house

c.

|

Some words that end ine in the singular need add only s for their plural, but the plural form is pronounced with the extra syllable. sizes edges colleges houses

Words ending in f must change to the v sound for the sake of ease in pronunciation. “Lifes’’ would be hard to Say. life

half

lives

halves

;

More About Nouns

IM DRAWINGA COW, BUT I’M HAVING TROUBLE WITH THE HOOFSESES...

45

NOT “HOOFSESES:.”. | |/BEES DON'T HAVE “HOOVES”... LIKE HOOVES ! BEES IN “BEHOOVES” HAVE FEET!

WHO YOU TRYIN’ TO KID?

o Ee

2 =a 3x 2E 3 goD5 a 6

5a

© 1980 United Feature Syndicate, Inc.

5.

Some words of foreign derivation form plurals according to the foreign pattern. phenomenon phenomena basis bases alumnus (a male) alumni alumna (a female) alumnae But as words become assimilated into English, they may adopt an English plural form. For example, medium has two plurals, media and mediums.

6.

Some nouns, such as sheep, do not change at all; they have the same form for singular and plural.

7.

Some words cannot be used with plural meaning and so have no plural forms. tennis, wealth, knowledge, mumps, advice

8.

Some words are permanently plural because of their meaning and have no singular, except as they refer to a science or study: athletics, acoustics, trousers, scissors

The theater’s acoustics are bad. My trousers are worn. Acoustics is the science of sound.

9.

Some words can remain singular in form and yet be either singular or plural in meaning: crew, audience, team, jury, committee

These are called collective nouns as they refer to a ‘collection’ of people who may or may not act collectively, that is, as a unit. The noun is plural as it means people acting individually. The jury (acting as one) declares its verdict. The team (as many members) eat their meals together and put on their uniforms.

46

More About: Nouns

C=C

EXERCISE

4.2

Directions:

Using your own knowledge of words or your dictionary, find more examples of plurals for categories 2 through 9.

Noun-Verb Agreement The fact that a noun can be singular or plural creates a situation called “agreement’’ between the noun-subject and the sentence verb. For most verbs, agreement ‘‘shows’’ only in the present tense and only with what is called a ‘third-person’ singular subject. Here are terms you must (and may already) understand: the word tense means time,

and a ‘‘present tense verb’ describes action taking place in the present. A ‘‘third-person’’ subject is a noun or a pronoun that takes the place of that noun. With such a singular subject every present tense verb ends in the letter s. 1.

The freshman (he) catches the touchdown pass. The waitress (she) easily carries the loaded tray.

The sign (it) marks the intersection.

Everyone (a person) does his or her own thing.

No one (a person) has heard the results. Each (a growing thing) grows at a different rate.

RW What NOW

(the answer, a set of numbers) is your ID?

The present tense verb without the s must have as its subject either |, we, you, a plural noun, or a plural, noun-replacing pronoun (they, both, many, etc.). : 1.

/ carry_ a fifteen-hour schedule.

We do_ our own thing. Are_ you sure of the way?

(You) Drive_ carefully.

Road signs (they) mark_ the turns. Both (persons) have_ heard the news. IRD Go 4S) Ol) Oye SN

Many (trees? people? Context must clarify.) catch_ fire quickly.

Tenses other than the present produce no agreement problems for any verb except the verb be. Furthermore, the verb be is the only verb

More About Nouns

47

that undergoes changes in form as it agrees with the pronoun subjects |, we, you.

Present tense: | am, you are, we are

Past tense: | was, you were, we were Note the third person forms of be. Present tense: the boy (he) is, the boys (they) are each (person) is, all (persons) are Past tense: the girl (she) was, the shoes (they) were One (person or thing) was, both were Other verbs, no matter what the nature or number of their subject,

have one form only for any tense other than the present tense and in the present tense have one form for all subjects other than the third person singular noun and noun-replacing pronoun. Look at the verb ask, for example. Present tense:

|, we, you, the men, they ask. The ‘boy, girl; dog, he, she, it asks. Past and future tenses: 1, you, we, the dog, the girls, they asked or will ask. Or examine the verb eat the same way. Present tense:

|, we, you, the cats, all eat. The cat, aunt, he, it, each eats. Past and future tenses: I, you, we, the bird, the horses, it, they, each ate or will eat.

Cautions

Not only can a noun be singular or plural, but also two or more nouns can join by means of the conjunction and to become a compound, or plural, subject in a sentence. 1 S# Foundation planting and a healthy lawn add value to a new home.

Disagreement between subject and verb occurs when the writer fails to recognize the number of a subject of a present tense verb. The careful writer is aware that the one-word subject is plural in these sentences: S The hills slope gently. The geese fly north. An s ending on either verb would be illegal! And the careful writer is aware that the subject consists of more than one noun in the following

sentence:

48

More About Nouns

The perspective and the contrast between light and dark give the painting unusual interest.

There are two subjects here: contrast and perspective. Using the verb form gives would be an error. Or disagreement results from careless omission

of the s with

singular subject,

At noon the place fills (not fill) up quickly. He always does (not do) the right thing.

Carelessness may also lead to disagreement as the s ending is omitted from the plural noun. Not: But:

The two boy have identical jackets. The two boys have identical jackets.

Or disagreement may come from failure to recognize meaning of a collective noun.

The family (either is or are) at home. But: The family exchange (not exchanges) gifts. (The last sentence says that family members act individually here.) Certain sentence situations discussed later in the book can lead to subject-verb disagreement. Disagreement can result from the following: 1. a mistaken attempt to make the verb agree with its subject 2.

3.

4.

complement instead of its subject (Chapter 7, page 119), inverted word order in a sentence (Chapter 7, pages 113-14),

the interruption of the prepositional phrase between subject and verb (Chapter 6, pages 93-94). failure to recognize the singular nature of many _ indefinite pronouns (Chapter 9, pages 187-88).

EXERCISE

4.3

Directions:

Pretend the language has a new verb (of unknown meaning!)— glog. Even though you can’t know what it means, you can use it in sentences because it follows the pattern of regular verbs in English. Fill in the blanks below with the proper form of glog.

Today or every'day |! si you And the child My foot

Te ee

We ae

49

More About Nouns

A mouse

The baby A crisis

Directions:

Now turn each noun above to plural and write those sentences below.

Today

Last week everybody Tomorrow

all of us

EXERCISE Directions:

4.4

Unscramble the words to make sense of these sentences. verb endings (s or no s, ed, ing) be clues.

1.

This is the frist ady fo the ster fo oury file.

2.

The soby are gphailssn ni the treaw.

3.

Almost everybody sleik sbaaann. i

4,

The sub-soffre reef sider orf aft sorforseps. i

5.

Yesterday no a nicpic we was wot sbera. $e

6.

Last yaSnud yeth deshaw herit rac and edwom the nawl. eee

7.

The pelan will prays the defil.

———————————— De

8.

We weer tangie zizap.

De

—

ee

Let

(©

50

More About Nouns

9. 10.

Cl

The nam has neeta his elam and is gainpy his libl. viDer in the githr elan.

EXERCISE

4.5.

Directions:

Choose the proper verb and record the appropriate letter in the column to the right.

1.

The Admissions Office about transfer credit.

a b (makes/make)

decisions

2.

Your high school average and your total SAT score (predicts/predict) your college performance. A three-lane road (is/are) on the edge of the property. The audience takestte their seats. The news (comes/come) n nearly every hour. Hunting and fishing (is/are) year around recreations. a ee A three-piece suit (consists/consist) of a vest, a pair of pants, and a coat. a ee The crowd, (moves/move) in an orderly fashion. 9. Cattle (is/are) a good investment. p b

10.

The soft shoulder and the ditch beyond (was/were) a distinct hazard on that road. I iaieneu (was/were) in the wrong lane. 12. It (looks/look) a bit like rain. 13. 14.

15.

They (seems/seem) very friendly. Everything ncnawone sometimes for the good. a The contrast between light and dark (gives/give) the painting its interest.

APPL S|

ARTICLES AND NOUNS The second distinguishing characteristic of the noun is that it is the only part of speech accompanied by an article: a, an, or the. The sound of the following word determines whether the article that

51

More About Nouns

precedes it is a or an. A precedes a consonant sound; an must precede a vowel sound: an apple, an ape, an egg, an eel, an infant, an island, an opera, an oar, an onion, an umbrella. The rule applies no matter what the nature of the word following the article, whether noun or noun-modifier:

an

ancient

land,

an

excellent

plan, an

ingenious

solution, an old man, an honest answer. Note also the necessity for the article a, not an, with such words as union and useful (a union, a

useful tool) since the sound of the vowel in those words is preceded by the sound of y.

Note also that by their meaning, a and an are singular and so will never be used with those words we noted as “permanently plural.” The is either singular or plural; it fits, for example, with mumps

(a

singular noun) as well as with acoustics (a plural).

EXERCISE 1.

2.

Unscramble the following words which need a as their article. aes OUC Serene en I Outad efte es 22 ve, piNGleN enke 2s ss Jobard Unscramble the following words which need an as their article. AneeeniOd sme ns

nin

Rite ee Sass Sheen pelapa ee 5Ae 3.

le

yp tat

i

Oper ott ct Gib cet panel lemonteet 90) See door Unscramble each of the following words to form a plural noun. Shy eee ee Oe lifes Sireees tt Wave 30) SS VSOIeX SCAN sa Ted ek De

5.

cline breh

Rearrange the letters in each of the following words to form a new noun. NOisen = Cate aa See a as

CAnOe sais

4.

4.6

ricess

NifA rstMEDIC eer a SI gen Fe| edie PadNala ee Unscramble the following nouns; then give each the proper article, a or an. NG Uigen ns1

SEN

pense

WOC

Dales mace. led. oieeen rore

52

More About Nouns

phoe

tha

ekal

primue

Bye eoale

Neate

bonita. + «2. tuages

geed

rai

foto

raea,

koa.

rae

ADJECTIVE MODIFIERS AND

NOUNS

A third characteristic of the noun is that it can be accompanied by one or more adjective modifiers. (To modify means to change; so a ‘modifier’ of a word changes the meaning of that word or adds to it.) The three articles form a small, compiete set of adjectives. Other

adjectives describe the number, or condition:

noun’s

shape,

size,

weight,

color,

age,

Square box, towering building, yellow floor, young adult, five years, ragged coat.

Adjectives can distinguish a noun from others: this paper, that course, these books, those students. They can indicate possession or origin:

your car, her words, my cap, his mother, its name, our hope, their aims. Note that there is never a comma between the adjective and its noun.

Adverbs need mention here because, although they primarily modify verbs (as their name suggests), they also add to the meaning of adjectives. The adverb can describe the degree or extent of the condition the adjective describes.

The adjective describes the day: A hot day is predicted. An added adverb explains how hot: A very hot day is predicted. Some other adverbs commonly used as modifiers of adiectives include

all, almost, enough, less, more, quite, rather, and too.

Note

that there

is never

adjective it modifies.

Adv.

a comma

between

the adverb

Adj. Adj.

Rather cool, brisk weather suggests fall.

and the

53

More About Nouns

Adv. Adj. Adj. Adj. The chair was all dirty, stained, and torn. Adv. Adj. Adv. The water is almost hot enough for coffee.

NOUN

ADJUNCTS AND NOUNS

The fourth characteristic of the noun is its ability to join another noun. As the two combine their meanings, the first noun increases the specificity of the second. For example, in the group of words that follows, note how the first noun makes the second more specific. auto mechanic, law court, peanut butter, light switch, shoe repair, truck driver, television set,

bus schedule, evening news, Halloween costume The combined words, though separated on the page, can be called a compound noun, or the first noun car be called an adjunct noun. (We confuse the situation and give ourselves punctuation problems if we call that first noun either an adjective or a modifier.) Adjectives can join nouns in the following pairs of words just as the adjunct noun does to form a compound: hot dog, iced tea, high school, blue cheese.

(Again, for the sake of punctuation, we must recognize the peculiar relationship between this adjective and its noun.) Very often, in what is probably the result of an evolutionary process and a disappearing hyphen, the noun and noun adjunct or the

noun and its permanent adjective become fused into a single word in

words such as these: housemother, eggshell, football, handbook, poolroom, sunlight, windshield, orangeade, horsewoman, roommate, weekend, highway, bluebird, longhand, and shortcake.

And a compound noun can have more than two parts: chocolate layer cake, brown leather loafers,

city bus schedule, and Peter Pan peanut butter.

COMMA Note that two or more coordinate adjectives before a noun must

be separated by a comma. The comma substitutes for the coordinating

USAGE

54

More About Nouns

conjunction and. If you can insert the and, you have proof for the need of the comma.

Adj. Adj. strong, hot coffee The comma is needed because strong and hot are coordinate. Articles (a, an, the), number words (one, twenty, etc.), demonstrative adjectives (this, that, these, those), and possessive pronoun adjectives (my, your, its, etc.) are never separated by a comma from other adjectives that they may accompany:

My one impossible dream These two disastrous mistakes.

Note that there can never be a comma immediately before the noun. Not: soft, white, fleecy, clouds

But: soft, white, fleecy clouds If you check your use of commas by substituting and for each one, your sentence would read ‘‘soft and white and fleecy and clouds’’!

It is important to recognize the difference between the modifying adjective and the noun or adjective adjunct that joins the noun to form a compound. Wine cellar is a two-word noun, so note the punctuation. Not: dim, cool, wine cellar But: dim, cool wine cellar Iced tea is a two-word noun, adjective-noun combination. Not: weak, sugary, iced tea

But: weak, sugary iced tea Since it is possible for more than two words to form the compound, watch the commas carefully in such a situation as this: delicious lemon cream pie

light, delicious lemon cream pie

(a three-word noun + one adjective) (comma needed between the

two coordinate adjectives— light and delicious lemon

cream pie).

More examples include: new macadam tennis court

expensive, new macadam tennis cour t

regal, long, flowing blue velvet evening gown.

More About Nouns

55

EXERCISE Directions:

Example:

1. Precede each of the pronoun-adjective (my, all of them!) 2. Give each of the nouns 3. Add an adverb to each

following nouns by a_ possessive our, your, his, her, its, or their—use ,

in the list an adjective. adjective you added.

your costume your tattered costume your badly tattered costume

. leewee

bracelet bracelet bracelet music music LEE

music

animals animals animals

on

ee

4.7.

tases oa lrish setter

Irish setter Irish setter

roof

0

56

More About Nouns

8.

eee ee houses houses

houses

9. ee eee

DSC lipstick

Se Ope

6 ee Ge

Se

hand hand

hand

Cl

EXERCISE

4.8

Directions:

Add the appropriate word—a or an.

1." 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

CJ

Love is priceless and enduring quality. He is honest man and humble one. The first letter is w and the last is m. outstanding architect will design hospital. We will see opera and new play by unknown writer. The man is authority in number of areas. He read eulogy and then epitaph. They used eight-track tape. She lived through illness. He brought ukelele from Hawaii.

EXERCISE

4.9

Directions:

Underline and label the adjectives and adverbs in the following sentences. Do not label articles.

1. 2. 3.

The weather is quite cool. This room is comfortably warm. You will be much more comfortable in a sweate r.

More About Nouns

57

4.

The space is too small for my car. Hardly any leaves have fallen. She was the only girl for him. Only one or two apples have worms in them. eee OO Se In the past few months the old man has become noticeably less active.

9. 10.

Very few workers

are completely

reliable under all difficult

circumstances. He is the very man for that extraordinarily dangerous mission. EXERCISE

Directions:

1.

4.10

OX

Add needed commas.

The snapshot clearly shows her short blonde curly hair and her

very large bright blue eyes. 2.

3.

4.

5.

Helen shopped all day in worn comfortable white canvas tennis shoes. Paul worked hard and got an almost completely flawless smooth wax finish on the antique walnut rocking chair. The package contained twenty worthless stock certificates and several faded yellowed tattered newspaper clippings. | ordered a roast beef sandwich on thinly sliced whole wheat

bread.

ARRANGING The trouble with paragraphs that list many things is the danger that they will turn into no more than the “grocery list’ paragraph: lots of goods things but no clue as to the menu or the finished dish. In other words, your paragraph needs a point, a purpose, for which you assemble all these good things. To find a purpose is not as hard as it sounds, since we can assume that your purpose in general for almost everything you write in college or on the job is to explain something, to inform somebody about something, or sometimes to persuade somebody of something. You are not trying to entertain, though you are trying to interest. The concrete details you have been practicing using will both interest and inform your reader, but they cannot accomplish the latter purpose unless they are presented in some recognizably logical order.

DETAILS

58

More About Nouns

So take a second look at the grocery list. Any useful grocery list has some sense to it. If your store routes you first through the produce, your list begins with lettuce and potatoes. Since you must move next through the dairy section, your list continues with the milk, eggs, and cottage cheese you need. Like the grocery list, two easy ways to organize the details of your paragraph are space and time whenever these arrangements develop naturally from the nature of the details. If you are describing a car, you might detail all the features of the outside of the car before you open the door and turn your attention to the upholstery and the gadgets on the dash. If you explain registration procedures, you would not advise someone to pay fees before filling out forms. Whether you are shopping, selling, or telling how-to, you will order the details of your explanation in a way that is logical and sensible to your listeners or readers.

Like grocery shoppers, writers make choices, both in what they put on their list and in the order in which they gather in the buggy

what they have decided they need.

In that grocery store you may

by-pass the vegetables and head straight for the meat counter. If you find you have time, you may go back and squeeze some tomatoes, but first things have come first. Or you may work the other way, quickly pushing your buggy around to pick up the /east important items and then stopping to spend much care choosing the perfect rib roast—the most important item on your list.

EXERCISE 1.

4.11

This is a list of “raw materials” for a paragraph describing a kitchen. Underline the items that must be deleted if the writer

chooses ‘The kitchen is a mess’’ for a topic sentence.

cupboard door ajar, cups on hooks, plates neatly stacked electric frying pan, cord still plugged in, cold, greasy egg scraps coke bottle half full, open, sitting on three sticky rings shiny chrome toaster, crumbs on top and around yellow linoleum, spotless, looks like a floor-wax ad under the table, a pair of track shoes, three dirty white socks, an orange plastic water dish for the dog open dishwasher, full of unwashed dishes

2. Alist for description of a dormitory room follows. So far, the only idea the writer can find is, “The room is small and crowded.” But

More About Nouns

59

the room also seems convenient to its owner. Add details to the

list so that the topic sentence can read, “The troom is small and crowded but also convenient.”

12h Se two desks, desk chairs, beds, dressers a refrigerator a stereo two speakers, and several feet of cord

;

\ 3. '

The items in the following list are in scrambled order. Number them to make a clear understandable paragraph. Do not write the paragraph.

Class in progress, door closed A lucky phone call Elevator slower than usual

Forgot book, went back upstairs Arrived at curb as bus left Picked a shirt from laundry pile Roommate turned off alarm No clean shirt Ran downstairs Ran across Campus A Coke and crackers breakfast

4.

Number the following sentences to make a coherent, unified paragraph. Mark with an X any sentences you could not use. Underline the controlling generalization—topic sentence. For students, books are as basic as beef.

Paper-backed texts have reached price levels belonging only to hardbacks in the past. While housewives protest rising prices at the supermarket, college students struggle with their own budget problems. Hardback texts are higher still. Only three hundred pages between flimsy cardboard covers can cost a hefty $12.95. Straining student budgets further, some courses require students to buy more than one text. An art book in hardback can cost $20.00 or more.

60

More About Nouns

Modern color reproduction is so true that book collectors don’t mind paying such high prices. Buy used books. There are several bookstores near the campus. English 101, for example, uses three texts—a grammar workbook, a book of essays, and a dictionary. There is only one effective way to keep book costs down. Book. prices have risen along with prices in general. Number the following sentences to put them in logical order. There are four windows. Two beds line the walls. One venetian blind has a broken slat.

The walls, now unpacked.

bare, will hold posters when

| oer them

Plants will line the window sills. The door of the room has four locks and a chain.

A box on one bed holds striped sheets which will become draperies.

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How do you start writing about these topics? First gather your material, which may be only a random list, but is the product of your observation (directly or through your ‘‘mind’s eye’’). Good advice for a writer is always to work from what he or she knows. (Remember a test answer you wrote when you did not know what you were writing about; the sentences were probably vague, the detail thin or missing entirely, the answer not satisfactory.) Also be sure you maintain unity by keeping your focus directly on your topic—the place for topic one, the set of actions in sequence for topic two, one or more specific products for three, and a particular situation for four. What can you use for first sentences?

For topic one, you could use as your first sentence: ‘‘My favorite eating place is... .”’ (its name or its type). Now you can go on to list (in space order probably) as many descriptive details as you want. Or, you could use the same pattern in your sentence but follow is with an adjective if you can see in your gathered descriptive details an overall impression the place makes. That is probably the kind of sentence you found for Exercise 2.8, paragraph 2. The room is comfortable (or some such).

To narrow your focus to one or two overall impressions, you will probably have to leave out some details on your original list, and you may need to look again at the place in the light of your chosen generalization and find more supporting details. For topic two, you have the same two options. You may start with the first step in the process: ‘‘The person who would learn to . . . must first find a teacher or a good set of directions.” Then you can continue ; in time order listing all necessary steps.

Or, you may see some thread of idea in these actions and you may want to use the idea in-your first sentence: “Learning to . . . is (hard, easy, or takes a long time).”” Again your list of steps must be adjusted to fit the idea. Topic three is typical of assignments that lead to opening sentences like this: ‘There are (three, or more or many) characteristics that identify ....’’ This is called an “organizing sentence.” It forecasts the divisions of your material and tells your reader what to expect. Sometimes as you explain the characteristics, you will discover something about them or the topic that you had not seen before. The statement of that idea will make a good ‘‘conclusion’’ for your explanation.

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Topic four may also begin with an organizing sentence: ‘There are (three, several, two serious, three less serious, etc.) difficulties concerned with ....’’ Or you may choose to move more slowly, examining one at a time: ‘‘The most important (or least important) problemminw. a 1S i 2°

As with topic three, be receptive to any ‘‘insight’’ you may have into the matter you are writing about and make that insight your concluding comment. The most successful first sentences—idea sentences or organizing sentences—come from the details you have gathered. If you try to work the other way around by imposing an idea on the topic and then looking for supporting details, you may find you have an unsupportable idea. If you decide before evidence gathering that there are three characteristics of a typical ‘‘lemon,’’ you may find later that there are really only two with some variations of each! If you establish price as the most important determinant of a ‘‘good buy,’’ you may discover

later that you value quality more. So do start the writing process by gathering specifics. They are the source of the most effective ‘‘topic sentences.”’

THE PARAGRAPH

AND THE ESSAY

So far you have written single paragraphs, not essays, although a single paragraph can be an essay. The length of an essay or its number of paragraphs can in no way be prescribed. Most essays, however, contain more than one paragraph, all combining to clarify the central idea of the essay. Thus, the essay, like the paragraph, will be unified. The word essay comes from a French root word essai which means ‘a try” or “‘an attempt.’’ So an essay by definition is a short literary Composition that attempts to make an idea clear. The essay’s central idea is called its thesis and can appear at the beginning, end, or middle of the essay, just as we have seen the topic sentence in various places in the paragraph.

The effectiveness of the essay depends on the effectiveness of its component parts, its paragraphs and their specific details and examples. Notice opening sentences for paragraphs and the order of details in the following excerpt from a professional essay. Can you also find a statement of overall idea or generalization, a thesis statement?

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ssay Hair Razing!

Today it’s simple for a man to find a place to get his hair styled. All he’s got to do is grab the phone book, look under Beauty Salons, and pick out a name in a foreign language (Panache for Hair) or one with vaguely literary pretensions (The Hair Affair). But, if a man wants his hair cut with talcum and tonic, if he wants ears that'll stop traffic, it’s another matter. He’s got to look under Hair for places with red-blooded All-American names like Bob’s or Bill’s or White’s. These are old-fashioned barber shops where a man can still get a crewcut, a flattop, a heinie, or a butch. They are places with barbers—not stylists—men who know that the Chicago boxcar is a haircut that is skin-short on top and long on the sides. Take White’s on Edgewood Avenue, across the street from Central

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City Park. Built in 1931 and bought by Bill White in 1946, it’s a model of the large, once-flourishing downtown barbershop. It sits modestly between the loud frontages of a McDonald’s and a Blimpie Base, on the

north side of the Ten Pryor Street Building. The red-white-and-bluestriped barber pole is housed in glass, but its motor is broken, so it doesn’t spin. The legend ‘‘White’s Barber Shop’’ is etched in elegant gold letters on the glass to the left of the doorway. There are no curtains or shades obstructing the view into the shop—just clean glass. The interior of the shop is Art Deco. A facade of shiny black glass runs along most of the length of the left wall. Pressed into it are seven large beveled mirrors. Before:them are nine porcelain sinks erupting from the floor like blossoms of frozen white water, seven bulky two-tone green barber chairs with pump handles, and an ancient cash register. Between the large mirror are some small mirrors set in wooden, ivory-painted work spaces. In each work space there are drawers hanging open to reveal serpentine electric cords with black and silver shaver heads; tonics like ““La-Lay—The Modern Dressing and Treatment for Skin and Scalp Dryness” are kept in small cabinets. There’s a hamper for towels at the bottom of each work space. Air hoses and neck dusters, for knocking stray hairs off customers’ necks, are clamped to brackets beside the large mirrors. The right wall of the shop, working up from the floor, is covered by two and a half feet of black-glass wainscoting, three rows of white glass tiles—half of them etched, half of them not—and a black band of glass. Above that, there’s an ivory wall and ceiling. The floor is terrazzo. In the back there’s a door that doesn’t go anywhere; in the front, hanging from the ceiling, there’s a good-sized Coca-Cola clock. The right wall is lined with a row of chairs for waiting customers. There’s also a manicurist’s table and three hat stands. There a

by permission. Jeffry L. Scott, Atlanta Weekly, 25 May 1980, pp. 6-7. Reprinted

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are not any girlie magazines, but there are lots of copies of Time, Sports Illustrated, and Reader’s Digest. And there is no music. If you’re lucky,

there will be a Braves game on the radio. On Saturdays the air is filled with the faint, sweet smell of talcum, but there’s not a trace of tonic. ‘It used to be a big item,” says one barber, ‘but not anymore.”’

There’s a drowsy feeling about the place. Roy Johnson’s electric clippers drone soporifically as he mows the hair of an old man, a customer for‘about six years. The man is draped\in a white bib covered with hair clippings, his mouth is: closed, and his eyes are squinted in a tight, wry expression

of content.

His cheeks

are pale, scruffy, and

hollow, and his lips are pursed. In fact, his lips seem exaggerated, like his pointed chin, which sticks out far. When he sat down, the man grunted, ‘/Raise the sideburns up some.”’ But now, relaxed against the

back of the chair, he is quiet and almost asleep. Johnson, a. genteel white-haired man who has barbered here for thirty-nine years, cuts away at the man’s greased, flat-gray pompadour, shaping it down one piece at a time—first, the tapered sides and back; then the sideburns,

the long straight top, and the crescent-shaped patches of skin shaved bare above the ears. If botched, and done to excess, these patches might win the time-worn epithet ‘““whitewalls.’’ At the front window,

in a heavy, hard wooden

chair, the shop’s

shoeshine man, Andrew Smith, stares absently out the glass and scratches the thin, scraggly crop of whiskers on his chin. Andrew also has a scraggly mustache. His face is broad, yellowy brown, pockmarked, and puffy, and his eyes are red and calm. Andrew’s hair is a black-and-gray weave that is severely sawed off across the top and sawed off down the sides in a blunt wedge. ‘Il got it cut down on Decatur Street,’’ Andrew says, ‘‘but they did a bad job. So | got one of the barbers here to cut it. It took him a week.’’ Except when he’s selling a shine, Andrew speaks almost inaudibly, under his breath. When Andrew is busy, he moves unnoticed about the shop, sweeping the floor, brushing hair off customers, and helping them put on their coats. For a shine he gets seventy-five cents—along with a quarter tip, usually—and he shines about thirty or forty shoes a day. Muddy boots, though, cost two dollars. Andrew works quickly, cleaning the leather with water and a brush, drying it, then rubbing in wax with two fingers and a cotton cloth. Next, he buffs the wax with a horsehair brush, occasionally adding a sprinkle of water. He waxes and buffs twice, then pulls out his buffing cloth. It’s about eighteen inches long and six inches wide. Grabbing each end tightly, he briskly snaps the cloth back and forth across the toe in a hard, inverted seesaw “U,”’ then

stops on the eleventh stroke and snatches the cloth with a stiff CRACK! (“That’s to let the air in.”’) Andrew quits the cadence when the toe shines bright. Then he buffs the sides. The whole job takes about ten minutes.

According to Bill White, the basic differe'1ce between a haircut and a hairstyle is the shampoo—and six dollars. And the style shops are

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booming. Still, a few quiet old shops in the city—most of them smaller than White’s with its seven chairs and six barbers—are reminiscent of

simpler times. These are places where an ordinary man‘can drop in and get a haircut for four dollars in nine minutes, if he’s bald enough. For a few dollars more, he can get a neck, head, and face massage, a shave, a shoeshine, and a manicure. The old-fashioned barbershop is probably not long for this world unless, perhaps, short hair is really becoming fashionable again.

EXERCISE 1. 2. oS)

4.

4.12

Underline any of the opening sentences that can be labeled “topic sentences’’ (that is, statements of an idea about the topic of the paragraph). Examine the arrangement of details within the paragraphs. What orders do you see? What order do you see in the progression of the paragraphs? What is the “thesis’’ of the essay?

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