After yet another week of grammar class I am still learning things. This week we worked on House Style for different publications, anywhere from magazines to newspapers. For my part I worked on the publication of the Spokesman Review Newspaper. While looking at this specific publication it was my duty to see how they use certain punctuation and grammatical rules. For my part this was a learning experience in itself. I was ignorant of the fact that different writing publications actually used different rules, I thought such rules were more of a national thing. The Spokesman Review, for instance puts movie titles and television shows in quotes, as opposed to underlining them. I found many of little rules that were being used differently in this publication, all of which I never would have explored or noticed otherwise.
This week we also went over some basics of grammar. This lesson included knowledge such as the fundamentals of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. Although this knowledge was not new to me, it has been a long time since I’ve been in contact with it. Sure I read a lot, but I don’t really contemplate the use of nouns and verbs in the sentence. In other words I don’t spend my time after reading a sentence dissecting the structure. We did this in class this week. Obviously it has been a long time since I have diagramed a sentence, but luckily I caught on rather quickly. It amazed me the things I had forgotten since grade school. The knowledge remained in the back of my mind, but was never really used until this moment in time. For instance I remembered that nouns are most easily identified as a person, place, or thing. However what I didn’t realize was that nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives are all considered part of ‘open class.’ This means that these parts of speech are constantly absorbing new words, an entire new vocabulary. Fascinating I thought.
Anyway it was nice to brush up on the four parts of speech that we use every day, without ever really considering it. As for my parting question I must ask why do you think that adverbs are used so rarely in speech or in print; especially if they are flexible and can be moved around in the sentence?
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I don't really know why adverbs aren't used to often. From what we learned in this last week with how flexible they are, you would think that people would be using them like wild fire! Personally, I think it may be because people don't realize how flexible they are or they may even be intimidated by the adverb. I don't know that. It could also just be that adverbs really aren't a big part of our language and aren't used that often. I would love to hear the answer to that too! :)
ReplyDeleteactually, you have plenty of adverbs in the paragraph you just wrote, Kara: not (in "don't), really, not (in "aren't), too, often, even, also, just, really, too...
ReplyDeleteThey just come naturally, I think. (Oops. I just used an adverb: naturally.