Hello all, I'm new here and have been looking around. Recently I have been writing a lot of manuals and reports at work; and it has made me want to become better at writing in general. When I was younger I liked to write short stories and received some nice critiques from teachers, so I decided to start writing short stories again to practice. I recently was looking into proper grammar, I found a website with short quizzes (Searching for 'English Grammar 101' will bring you to the site), and I found that my weakest area so far is identifying prepositional phrases. Prepositional pairs to be exact. I was wondering if anyone had any solid resources on learning this skill. I looked through many websites and a few ebooks on project gutenberg but couldn't find anything that I could identify with. Any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Thanks for the link, it did seem to help a little. I'm starting to think I just need more practice. The main problem I am having is picking out prepositional phrases when multiples exist in a single sentence. I seem to do fine if there is only one in a sentence, but it trips me up when there are more. Here is an example: Near the door of the cabin, large pine trees grew. I know that the part of the cabin is an adjective phrase, but I get tripped up on the part Near the door. I know it is an adjective phrase, but I just miss it. Another example is like the following: Next to the house, there stood a large pine tree covered with snow. I can easily pick out the phrase Next to the house. The next phrase however is a bit muddy, I want to say that the next phrase is covered with snow. But the critique says that it is with snow. I think I understand most of it, but i it's just down to practicing more.
subject/noun: trees predicate/verb: grew 'near the door' modifies [where?] the verb 'grew'... 'of the cabin' modifies [where?] 'door'... subject/noun: tree predicate/verb: stood 'next to the house' modifies [where?] 'stood' '['that is' is unstated/understood] covered with snow' modifies [what kind?] 'tree' and is actually two modifying phrases... '[that is] covered' modifies 'tree' and 'with snow' modifies '[that is] covered' you need to learn how to diagram sentences... doing that will end your confusion...
"Near the door" is an adverbial phrase. It modifies the verb and tells where the trees stood. Practice diagramming sentences so you can see what is related to what in a sentence.
what program do you use to do diagrams, david?... I could sure use one for situations like this, as well as for my mentees and clients...
Oh, I just put that together in Photoshop. If I needed to diagram a sentence, I would do it on paper. But I was drilled in this so much as a child, I can do them in my head now. Out of curiosity, I searched and found this online utility that works quite nicely. Note the arrow buttons at the top that give you alternative diagrams after you enter a sentence. In this case, version #3 is identical to what I posted above. EDIT: A nice little introduction to diagramming here.
I've been able to do them in my head, too, since I learned the process in grade school, back in the 40s... whoever's responsible for dropping it from the curriculum should be sentenced to spend eternity sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on their head... thanks for the utility info...
So I've never heard of sentence diagramming before. I've been looking it over and it's very interesting. I'm going to continue trying to learn this skill. It seems very useful and as a programmer actually seems more natural. Very similar to tree and graph theory in math.
