End of Week 5

Wow, can you believe that we just completed week 5?  I know!  If you haven't yet, you might want to check the grades on Bb to see how you are doing so far.  Also, keep in mind that July 26 is the date for the Exit Essay.  You MUST be present in class that day in order to take this essay.  It is like your final exam for the writing portion of our class.

Today, we reviewed A LOT.  Let's take a quick look back at some of the key ideas we've learned so far this summer...

Sentences are made up of three elements

1. Subjects--noun or pronoun that tells what/who the sentence is about
2. Verbs--show the action the subject is doing or links the subject to a description of itself
3. Complete thought

The cow jumped over the moon.  (bonus if you can find the prepositional phrase!)


Verbs do SO MUCH for our sentence though, and we've spent a great deal of time already on learning about them.  We know several things about VERBS:

• There are three kinds of verbs (action, helping, linking)
• There are two types of tenses (simple and perfect) and each has past, present and future 
• Verb tense should be consistent throughout a piece of writing

But today, we learned something even more particular about verbs...they MUST AGREE WITH THE SUBJECT OF A SENTENCE IN NUMBER (for present tense, mostly).

Normally, we know that singular subject do not end in "s" while the plural versions do.

Singular=cow
Plural=cows

With many verbs, this rule is the exact opposite.  Normally, the singular form of the verb ends in "s" while the plural doesn't

Singular=jumps
Plural=jump

*of course there are some odd-ball verbs and subjects out there, but this is a general idea that can help*

Your book has some great charts to help you study, especially when it comes to using pronouns as subjects.

OWL also has a pretty nice worksheet to walk you through verb agreement (click here)







Finally, practice really does help you become more and more comfortable with the agreement.  Sometimes, what is correct for our writing, isn't how we speak.  In fact, when talking to friends and family, it is often really common to hear someone say "It don't matter" or "we was working."  These expressions are not considered correct in writing though because the subjects do not agree with the verbs.

PS--check out the stuff on outlines too.  We covered that today as well, but the information is already on the blog because we used this instead of my sloppy handwriting on the board today.