Conclusion to Word Groups

Okay let’s look at the same snippet from a slightly different perspective. On the previous page, we broke it down like this:

But let's forget about prepositional phrases for a moment.

Here’s a different way to break down the first noun group:

Do you remember what a ‘focus’ is?

You might have to go back and look at the noun groups lesson, but a focus is a modifier, usually ending in the word ‘of’, that comes at the beginning of a noun group and literally focuses our attention on a particular part of the main noun.

Here’s an example of a focus from that noun groups lesson to jog your memory:

See the similarity?

So let’s treat this snippet as a noun group that begins with a focus. 

That would mean that the pronoun ‘these’ is functioning as the main noun in the noun group, and that ‘the greatest of’ is focusing on one part of ‘these’. 

If we wanted to write variations using that specific pattern, how would they look?

Some of our examples from the previous page still match the pattern (you might notice these ones have matched all three patterns across the pages):

These ones don’t match:

Why don’t they match? Because neither the toothpick nor Brooklyn could be said to be the main nouns in either of those sentences—the librarian is not the focus of the toothpick, and the truck drivers are not the focus of Brooklyn.

But again we could change them to match:

Now they match the pattern—and hopefully now you can see that treating this noun group as focus + noun takes you different in a slightly different direction than treating it as noun + prepositional phrase.

Let’s write some variations. Here are the responses you wrote on the previous page.

If a response already matches the new pattern, highlight it to show how it matches. 

If it doesn’t match the new pattern, see if you can alter it to match. If small alterations don’t work, write a whole new response.

So what was the point of this?

One point is that you’ve seen how we can look at even a short seven-word snippet from three different perspectives and create different variations each time.

You’ve also seen how we can look at top-level word groups, and then dive down to unpack modifiers if we want to look at a snippet in more detail.

Remember: none of this is about how you write, it's all about how you analyse writing—both your own and that of others—and look for ideas on how to improve.

But which one was right?

They were all right! All three patterns made sense, and helped you produce meaningful variations. 

If you really wanted to know whether main noun + prepositional phrase or focus + main noun is the right way to look at the snippet, the best way is to read the snippet aloud and listen to where the emphasis lands for you, because that will tell you what you consider to be the main noun:

• The greatest of these was fear.
• The greatest of these was fear.

Both readings make sense, they just have different emphases, and that is enough to subtly change our grammatical analysis. 

But again, the lesson you want to take from this is that even simple sentences can have hidden depths, and you can explore these by being logical, systematic, and experimentally-minded, and by trying the different language tools you’ve learned in these lessons.

Let's get back to some simpler rewrites!