Conclusion to Word Groups

During Prep every boy

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Let's switch to a different passage from a different author.

Here's an excerpt from Roald Dahl's memoir, Boy.

How does this feel different to the passage we read from Tomorrow, When the War Began?

You should know that during Prep every boy in the Hall sat at his own small individual wooden desk. These desks had the usual sloping wooden tops with a narrow flat strip at the far end where there was a groove to hold your pen and a small hole in the right-hand side in which the ink-well sat.

Boy(1984)

There are a few obvious differences: the sentences are longer in Boy, while Tomorrow uses fragments and repetition.

Another difference is in the way Roald Dahl uses adjective groups. Unlike Marsden, who in Tomorrow is all urgent business, in Boy Dahl wants to lovingly describe details from his childhood, including details about the kind of desk he sat at in Prep school.

For example, let's look at the first sentence more closely. How is it structured?

During Prep every boy in the Hall sat at his own small individual wooden desk. 

Boy(1984)

The main feature we can see are the three prepositional phrases, which tell us:

  • When (During term)
  • Where (In the hall)
  • Where (At their own small individual wooden desks)

But let's focus in on the words that make up the noun group in the long prepositional phrase at the end:

During Prep every boy in the Hall sat at his own small individual wooden desk. 

Boy(1984)

You can see how elaborate the noun group is relative to the writing in Tomorrow, When the War Began. This noun group has several describers and classifiers.

Here are a some worked examples using the same pattern.

First we'll highlight the high-level structure with the three prepositional phrases, then we'll highlight the components of the noun group, including any adjectives and adverbs.

(Note that we're not going to try to match the noun group components exactly, but we will try to get a similar density.)

That summer the gang on the waterfront ran into an even more vicious upcoming rival squad.

That summer the gang on the waterfront ran into an even more vicious upcoming rival squad.

You can see how we've created an elaborate noun group, but this time including intensifiers in the embedded adjective group.

Here's another example:

Under cover of night, Hannibal, for reasons of his own, left with only two boxes of the eye-wateringly brightly painted Italian model cars.

Under cover of night, Hannibal, for reasons of his own, left with only two boxes of the eye-wateringly brightly painted Italian model cars.

Write your own version using three prepositional phrases, but in one phrase use a more elaborate noun group. Only highlight the components of your elaborate noun group.
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