Intro to Word Groups

Hey there! This introduction covers the lessons in the Grammar Basics: Word Groups series. These include:

• Noun groups
• Verb groups
• Adjective groups
• Adverb groups
• Prepositional phrases

If you’re doing these lessons, it means we’re going to be learning about grammar together. 

You might have strong feelings about this:

• “Grammar sucks! It’s boring, confusing and useless!”
• “Grammar is easy! Verbs, nouns—I know all that!”
• “I already write well and I don’t know anything about grammar—why should I learn it now?”

Fair enough! These are all valid points.

Let’s see if we can convince you this is going to be fun, interesting, and worthwhile.

Grammar is not for writing, it’s for editing and analysis.

Meaning, nobody consciously thinks about grammar as they write: ”Okay, first, gotta think of a noun, next... what’s a good verb?” 

Nobody does that.

But writers and editors do think about grammar—and talk about it—when analysing, editing, and revising a piece of writing: ”This sounds weird, why is that? Maybe I should move this adverb over.”

Also, once you get familiar, you’ll discover how closely grammar is tied to meaning, and how much of what we think of as ‘voice’ or ‘style’ in a piece of writing is a result of grammatical choices.

Here's an example of how looking at the grammatical mechanics of a piece of writing can give you insights and ideas.

Below are two snippets, one from Stephanie Meyer's Twilight, a modern vampire novel published in 2005, and the other from Bram Stoker's Dracula, the original vampire novel, published 100 years earlier in 1897. 

We have highlighted:

• People
• Things
• Actions

Use the highlighting to compare the passages. Do you see any major differences between the two?

What do you see?

Both stories are written from the narrator's point of view, so they both use I/we phrasing. 

But in Dracula, only half of the actions are attributed to people (we were hemmed in, we swept along, I was dreadfully afraid, etc)—while the other half are attributed to things:

• The narrow roadway ran sharply
• The trees arched right over
• The great frowning rocks guarded boldly

In contrast, in Twilight almost all of the actions are attributed to the people, in particular the narrator:

• I could see
• I froze dead
• I was being herded

What does that mean? 

In Dracula, the landscape is an active force. The narrator is travelling in a carriage while the landscape arches, hems, guards, moans, whistles, bays around him. 

In contrast, the environment in Twilight is static, like a low-budget film set—some gloomy flats extending into the distance. Almost all the action is from the narrator.

With this insight, you can examine the effects created by each approach, and experiment with them in your own writing—you might use ideas from Dracula to make your landscape more active and rich (or you might use ideas from Twilight to make it more static and simple).

For example, say you were writing that scene in Twilight and you wanted to capture more of that Bram Stoker feeling, you might wind up with something like this:

Having written that example above, you could use the same analysis to critique it: Stoker balanced environment and narrator 50/50. The example above skews more like 80/20 towards the environment.

Is that too much? Do we need to see more of the narrator? Does the effect become overblown?

That would all be for you to think about, discuss, and decide.

Where are the fancy grammar terms?

You might have noticed in the exercise above that we used very simple terms: people, things, actions. 

But most grammar terms are more fancy-sounding than that. For example, we could have instead used noun groups (for people and things) and verb groups (for actions). 

But sometimes those terms are not the tools you need, and what's important here is to realise that grammar is a tool for you to use to examine and manipulate writing—it's not this arbitrary body of terms and rules for you to submit yourself to.

Here's the good news

If you are a native or fluent English speaker, you are already an intuitive grammar master. Our brains are wired to learn grammar from the moment we are born, and you’ve been learning English grammar all your life, or at least for many years.

In English at least, we pick up grammar in a surprisingly consistent order:

Things

Around the age of one, we start to learn words for objects: dog, fish, cup, book. (But these aren’t always nouns: ‘woof’ might represent ‘dog’.)

Actions

Then we start to learn words for actions, usually as commands: up, drink, go, mine. Again, these aren’t necessarily verbs.

Phrases

Then we start to learn hard-to-categorise but socially-useful words and phrases: bye bye, no more, where.

Even with these basic materials, little toddlers are learning some basic grammatical rules: that there are words for things, words for actions, and phrases that we don’t use to describe the world so much as interact with each other.

Two-word combos

Soon we start to put these words together: where dog, my spoon, want ball.

Again there is some grammar there: for example, we are figuring out that question-word, describer-word, and action-word all come before the thing-word.

Explosion

And then suddenly from that point things come together very quickly, and over a year or so we will start speaking in full sentences: I want to go to the toilet; when are we going to the park; I can’t find my bunny.

These are still relatively simple sentences with a person-action-thing type structure, but inside that structure is all sorts of emergent knowledge about how we describe action, including rules for tense, timing and modality.

It all builds from there, until you reach a point where you are a fluent speaker around the age of 6-7.

However, there is a big difference between being a fluent speaker and a fluent writer, because our written expression can often be a lot more complex than our spoken expression.

The bad news is...

One of the things that feels most weird about learning grammar is that you are being asked to learn alien-sounding rules for something that you already know how to do intuitively.

So these lessons are going to feel awkward and clunky at times, and that can be extremely frustrating: “Why do I have to do this? I already know how to speak and write! Why do I have to learn all these weird names and rules?”

As you do these lessons, be patient, and keep some perspective.

Keep reminding yourself: we’re here to learn about patterns in our language, and become familiar with tools to describe the components we use every day.

You don’t need to memorise everything in these lessons (at least we don’t think you do; your school or teacher might feel different).

What you want to walk away with is the ability to look at a sentence and break it into chunks, and understand basically what those chunks do.

Getting exactly the right terminology is not as important as being able to pinpoint what each part of the sentence is doing, and be able to think about what might happen if you changed it.

When we say “learn grammar” we should really say “learn a grammar” because there is no one grammar that explains all of English.

We have some components on which pretty much everyone agrees: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and so on. 

But we very quickly get into territory where different grammars not only label things in different ways, they sometimes explore completely different concepts—and this is completely fine. One grammar is not more ‘right’ than another.

What does this mean for us?

For one thing, you will probably find that we will talk about things one way here on Writelike, and then you will go to a website and see the same thing described differently.

Sometimes that difference is only superficial labelling, but sometimes the differences will be significant and might be confusing.

Don’t be surprised, panicked, or frustrated. Just be calm, accepting, and prepared to do some critical thinking to figure out if the differences are important or not.

On Writelike, we tend to use something called Functional Grammar

Functional grammar is, as the name suggests, concerned with the function of language—what is the language trying to do? 

For instance, at the highest level, language is all about describing people (or participants) doing things (or processes) under specific circumstances. For example:

Elias played that night.

That is a person–process–circumstance combo right there.

Functional grammar then goes on to break those components down into more detail, which is where we will begin in our word group lessons. 

You'll probably find that functional grammar overlaps with the school grammar you're used to; some terms will be familiar, some will be new. 

We hope that learning some functional grammar will make it easier for you to learn other grammars.

The best way to lock down what you’ll learn in these lessons is analyse the grammar of texts that you read.

The second best way is to create your own little grammar textbook.

We strongly suggest you do the following:

• Set up a paper notebook or a digital doc, and as you go through the lessons write what you learn in your own terms, as if you were trying to explain grammar to someone else.
• Ask yourself the following questions about each word group or phrase:
  • Function: What does it do?
  • Position: Where can it appear within a sentence, and relative to other word groups?
  • Boundaries: How do you recognise the beginning and end of this group or phrase?
  • Components: What types of words make up the group? (Plus: What are they called? Where do they appear? Which types are essential? Which are optional?)
• Write your own examples of each group or phrase, or try to find examples in other texts.
• And if you ever get confused, check a dictionary or online grammar reference—though like we said before, you’ll find that terminology varies slightly across sources.

You don't have to take this far to get a benefit 

If you’re interested in language, you can go deep. But even if you’re not interested, doing a little bit of this work will help you consolidate and organise what could otherwise become confusing.

It’ll make your life easier, and make you more comfortable learning this content.

So we strongly recommend creating your own grammar text!

In the word group lessons, you're going to learn terms like noun, adjective, adverb and preposition.

But before we do that, we have one very important thing to say, no matter which lesson you do first:

Noun, verb, adjective etc are all jobs, and words can have different jobs depending on context

For example, the word ‘sit’ is a verb: “Sit down!”

Easy! Grammar is our friend!

But then imagine we said, "I’m going to have a sit down with Julius.”

Now ‘sit’ isn’t a verb, it’s a noun. 

So when we say a word is this or that—a noun, verb, adjective, whatever—it’s good to remind yourself that this is not entirely true:

A word is not something; a word only ever ‘functions as’ or ‘acts as’ something.

For example, sit usually functions as a verb, but occasionally functions as a noun.

Here’s another example

What is the word ‘down’?

Is it an adjective? An adverb? A noun?

Again, it ‘is’ none of these things; but it can function as any of them:

• Adverb: “He sat down.”
• Preposition: “She rode down the street.”
• Adjective: “I’ve been feeling down.”
• Verb: “Cornelius downed a gallon of milk.”
• Noun: “The pillow was filled with the finest down.”

We want to point this out because sometimes it can be confusing seeing the same word labelled different ways.

Once you’ve seen a word labelled one way (“This ‘as’ is an adverb!”) you will probably want to keep labelling it that way (“Every ‘as’ is an adverb!”) and then get angry when you find your rule doesn’t hold up (“What do you mean 'as' is a preposition now!?”).

Whereas if you keep reminding yourself that words can change their functions, then you won’t be caught off guard.

In the Word Groups series we’re going to learn about what are called word groups and phrases.

Word groups help us understand what words mean, plus add more detail.

For example, let's take a simple word like ‘cheat’. What does it mean?

The answer is, it depends:

• Are we asking what is ‘a cheat’?
• Or are we asking what it is ‘to cheat’?

The first is a thing, the second is an action.

Now do you notice though how each form has an extra word to communicate which it is?

• A cheat
• To cheat

Those extra words are the start of how we get word groups. These word groups can get bigger and more complicated:

• A truly fiendish Minecraft cheat—that is what we would call a noun group.
• Might have been about to recklessly cheat—that is what we would call a verb group.

We’re going to learn about four word groups:

• Noun groups—representing things, including people, animals, objects, and concepts
• Verb groups—representing actions and processes
• Adjective groups—describing qualities of things
• Adverb groups—describing qualities of actions and processes

And we’re going to learn about one type of phrase:

• Prepositional phrases—which add all sorts of extra information about where, when, how, why, and so on

Simple examples

Put them together

The chocolate ice-cream melted slowly in the sun.

More elaborate examples

Put them together

Finally, Uncle Henry’s last classic French meal is going to suddenly vanish without a trace of its ever having existed.

With these five components you can explain just about anything happening in a simple sentence. Here are some examples. You'll notice almost everything in each sentence is one of the five components you've just seen.

If you're reading carefully, you might notice some word groups embedded inside other word groups.

For example, an adjective group embedded inside a noun group:

• An endless afternoon
• An endless afternoon

Or a noun group inside a prepositional phrase:

• To his desk
• To his desk

Or a combination of both:

• In the dull light
• In the dull light

So there can be word groups within word groups! 🤯

You can see that everything in these sentences is part of one of the four word groups, or a prepositional phrase—except for the words ‘and’ and ‘because’. 

Which brings us to what these lessons don't cover!

Conjunctions, clauses, and complex sentences

In the word groups lessons, the most important words we don't cover are conjunctions. These are connecting words such as ‘and’, ‘because’, ‘so’, and so on.

These words are the gateway to more complex sentences, which we will cover in a different set of lessons.

That's it! You're all set!

You might be wondering, "Why did I just do that lesson? I don't know what I learned." 

So let's recap:

• The word groups lessons are about grammar, but don't panic or roll your eyes. 😨
• Grammar is a powerful tool for analysing and editing your writing. 💪
• Looking at text through a grammar lens can give you insights and ideas you can use in your own writing.
• It also gives you a shared language you can use to discuss your writing with other people. 
• You are probably an intuitive grammar master already; we're going to learn to talk explicitly about something you already do intuitively, which is going to feel weird.
• To do this we're going to use elements of functional grammar, which focuses on what we do with language, because we think it's very practical. 🛠️
• There are other types of grammar that you might already know or will meet when looking at references on the internet; there's no 'one right grammar', they're all just tools to explain how language works. 🇺🇳
• We're going to learn about four word groups—noun, verb, adjective, and adverb groups—plus what we call prepositional phrases. With these tools, you'll be able to explain most of what happens inside any simple sentence.
• You don't have to memorise every detail in these lessons, but we do want you to learn the function of different word groups, where they tend to appear, how to recognise their boundaries, and what components they are made from.
• We strongly suggest that at the end of each lesson you write your own set of notes, in your own words, with your own examples. This will help you consolidate what can otherwise be quite confusing information. 📗 🧠

And the most important message of all: relax and try to enjoy learning these concepts about language. You'll acquire a set of tools that will let you break down and examine any piece of text you're interested in, and will make you a better writer. 😊 💪

So that's it from us for now. See you in the word groups lessons! 👋