Ory's writing notes: Verbals.

Now we get to move onto the more interesting parts of English Grammar (I consider verbals, phrases, and Clauses the most interesting because I have the least amount of knowledge on them, but that is going to change!)

So what is a verbal? A Verbal is when we use a verb as either a noun, adjective, or adverb. There are three types of Verbals.

The first type of Verbal is called Participles. They use, as the name should imply, either the present Participle or past Participle form of a verb. Participles are used as adjectives in the sentence. Here are two examples of Participles.

Present Participle: The Burning Tree...

Past Participle: The Burned tree...

You can also have Participle phrase.

Example: Singing her song, Azure awed the crowd.

The last part of Participles I want to touch on is that you can have Restrictive and nonrestrictive Participles. What Restrictive means is that it is required for the sentence to make sense.

Restrictive example: The girl wearing the blue dress is pretty. (We don't know which girl the speaker is talking about without the 'wearing the blue dress' part.

Nonrestrictive example: Beth, wearing a blue dress, is pretty. (This is nonrestrictive because the speaker knows the girl by name, also notice how commas are added to the sentence.

Gerunds are verbs that use the present participle form on a verb but act as a noun.

Gerunds can act as the subject, subject complement, direct object, indirect object, or object of a preposition.

Subject: Dancing is my favorite activity.
Subject Complement: My favorite activity is Dancing.
Direct Object: I really enjoy Dancing.
Indirect object: I give dancing all my effort.
Object of a preposition: I have sore feet from dancing.

A Gerund phrase is the gerund plus its object and modifiers.

Example: Dancing the waltz is my favorite activity.

Infinitives are the last type of Verbal. Infinitives can act as a noun, adjective, or adverb. To create an infinitive all you need to do is as 'to' + the present tense form of the verb (To walk).

Infinitives can also use the passive, perfect, progressive, and perfect progressive form of a verb.

Passive: To be murdered...
Perfect: To have been murdered...
Progressive: To be murdering...
Progressive perfect: To have murdered....

Infinitive phrases is made up of the infinitive plus its object and modifiers.

Noun: To dance with Walter would make my day.
Adjective: Dinner was hotdogs to kill for.
Adverb: The light was too bright to look at.

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So this concludes my notes on Verbals. I read an article on Verbals, and their purpose is to add flow (I loath the word flow, what does that even mean?) to your sentences and to help paint a concise image for the reader to have; more precisely, you can use verbals to show the relationship between the scene/event and your character.

Going back to my opening Paragraph from chapter one (@Lifeline ) let me see if I can paint a little bit of a sharper image to help the reader see the scene a bit better.

In a dark vestibule, beautiful cockroaches, with their gorgeous black and amber bodies, crawled up and down the walls, and in and out of the air vents. Standing there, I could feel the sound of a thousand tapping feet in between the drywall and the studs; it felt as if they were crawling in between my bones and muscles on my arms, legs, and chest. My blessed Synesthesia. Hoping the sensation would pass, I hugged myself and rocked back and forth.

Well, in any case, onto phrases I go.