Editorial Inspirations

Adjectives are words that describe nouns or pronouns. They may come before (The cute kitten is sitting on the chair.) or they may come after the word (The kitten is cute.) they describe.

Adverbs are words that describe everything but nouns and pronouns. They describe adjectives, verbs, and other adverbs. Adverbs answer the questions how, when, or where.

The adverbs that cause grammatical confusion are the ones that answer how. Below are some guidelines to help distinguish between adverbs and adjectives.

Guideline 1: If a word answers the question how, it is usually an adverb.

Guideline 2: When describing taste, smell, look or feel, instead of asking if these senses answer the question how, ask if the sense verb is being used actively.

Examples

Flowers smell sweet/sweetly.
Do the flowers actively smell with noses? Since they do not, “sweet” is the correct word.

Try It!

Select which word is appropriate for each sentence.

1. She thinks slow/slowly.

2. We performed bad/badly.

3. The woman looked angry/angrily.

4. The boy jumped quick/quickly.

5. The hamburger tasted disgusting/disgustingly.

A gerund is a word that ends in -ing and is acting as a noun. All gerunds end in -ing, but not all -ing words are gerunds; only the ones that are acting as nouns.

This is important to distinguish because of how gerunds are treated within sentences. Since gerunds are nouns, if pronouns are placed before them, the pronouns must be in the possessive form.

Correct: My going to the mall left Stacie home alone.

Incorrect: Me going to the mall left Stacie home alone.

Try It!

Find the gerunds in the sentences below and make sure the sentences with gerunds have pronouns, not nouns, before the gerunds.

1. My parents are going shopping because them shopping always lowers their stress levels from work.

2. Us going to the party will be a surprise for Chris.

3. I am writing a paper for school because me writing it will get me a better grade.

4. She was surprised at them going to the library.

5. Him falling off the swings led to him getting stiches on his leg.

Abbreviations seem to be more popular as language progresses and hybrid products are created. They have also have become quite common in our everyday writing and speech, probably due to the fast-paced world we live in. Text messages and email make abbreviations even more prevalent. It sometimes seems that abbreviations have taken over our language!

Abbreviations are used to shorten both phrases and words. There are two types of abbreviations used to shorten phrases: acronyms and initialisms.

Acronyms are abbreviations that are pronounced as words. Some examples are

NATO
AIDS
OPEC
SQL

Initialisms are abbreviations that are pronounced one letter at a time. Some examples are

FBI
HTML
XML
IBM
HP
DVD
VHS

Keep an eye out for redundancy when using abbreviations. Redundant abbreviations are so common that New Scientist coined the term RAS Syndrome, which stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. Another example of a redundant acronym is PIN number. You wouldn’t say Personal Identification Number number, would you?
 
Some other popular redundant abbreviations are

ATM machine
UPC code
HIV virus
LCD display
ABS system
VIN number

Try It!

1. Make a list of 5 popular acronyms.

2. Make a list of 5 popular initialisms.

3. Make a list of 5 popular redundant abbreviations.

A comma splice occurs when two main clauses are linked by only a comma.

Comma Splice Example: It was raining hard, I decided to  stay at home.

Comma splices can be corrected by (1) replacing the comma with a period, (2) replacing the comma with a semicolon, or (3) inserting a coordinating conjunction immediately after the comma.

Depending on the meaning of the sentence, the following coordinating conjunctions could be inserted: and, but, or, not, for, so, yet.

Correction: It was raining hard. I decided to stay at home.

Correction: It was raining hard; I decided to stay at home.

Correction: It was raining hard, so I decided to stay at home.

Try It!

Below is a rough draft of an essay that includes several comma splices. Find and correct them to make the essay flow better.

The best kind of editor is one whose presence is not even seen. An editor is a behind the scenes person, she improves the grammar of the writer, she makes the message more understandable. An editor improves the image of the author. An editor is a silent advocate for the writer, making the author more trustworthy to the audience. Because the editor is a behind-the-scenes person, many people don’t realize the value of the editor, some never realize the value of the editor, others realize the value of the editor once it is too late and an image or trust has diminished.

A sentence fragment is a group of words beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period but missing at least one of the following elements: a subject, a verb, or a complete thought. Though a sentence fragment is written as a sentence, it is only part of one.

One way to check for sentence fragments is to read each group of words written as a sentence, making sure that it contains at least one subject and one predicate and a complete thought.

Try It!

Look at the groups of words below. Decide is they are sentences or sentence fragments. If they are sentence fragments, determine what is missing and revise it to make a complete sentence.

1. Bill always playing in the yard on the weekends.
2. When Sally tried to change my mind.
3. For example, the plastic bottle with a green label.
4. Which helped to reduce the pain from the subburn.
5. Water sparkling in the moonlight.