Now we get to the cool stuff. Now we take your ride and we modify it. Add a system, a moon roof, some racing slicks, some window tint and you've got a fabulous sentence. What? You think I'm going to do that stuff for your car? There's tons of modifiers that you can use to tweak your sentence, but I'm only going to deal with three different kinds. You've got adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. Have you heard of those words before?
Adjectives are those things that make the driver comfortable. The leather bucket seats, the leather wrapped steering wheel cover, the cool sunglasses. Adjectives modify nouns. That means they change nouns a little bit. You can have a student or you can have a sleeping student. It's the same noun, but the second one was modified a little, something more in line with reality, right? Now you can have the leather bucket seats of adjectives or you can have a seat cover that keeps sliding down. The luxury adjectives are the phrases. An adjectival phrase is a group of words that you slip in front of a noun to modify it. She has champagne taste and he has an eat at McDonald's budget. Or you can bypass the leather and go for a vinyl bench seat special. She has expensive taste and he has a cheap budget. I think you can see the difference.
Adverbs are the meat of your modifiers. Everyone has heard of an adjective and they usually know what they do. Most people have heard of adverbs, but couldn't spot one without a sign. An adverb is a word that modifies everything but a noun. Usually they end in -ly. Here's a few examples, see if you can pick out the adverb. Slowly drifting clouds. Screamed loudly. Adverbs add the music to your grammar. Now you can pick what kind of system you want in your vehicle. You can run the top of the line Blaupunkt with more watts per channel than the sun puts out, or you can pick the AM radio and listen to Lawrence Welk. She screamed loudly. Yawn. She screamed glass-breaking, ear-drum piercing loudly. A little better. Your choice in tunes, 10-CD disc changer or an 8 track.
Now prepositions are where the rubber meets the road. They tell your sentence where it's being driven. On, over, to, after, in, of, under, at, or any one of a dozen places in relation to the road. Prepositions are extremely easy to understand because you've got two parts to it. The preposition itself, which is merely the beginning word that indicates the position of the following word. It'll make more sense in a minute. Then there's the object of the preposition. It's not the same thing as the object of the whole sentence. The object of the preposition is just the word that indicates what we're in relation to. Like a good tire, preposition are imperative to keeping your sentence on the road. See, prepositional phrase: on the road. Cool huh?
Some cars you share the road with are huge. You've got SUVs, trucks, and those monstrous 18-wheelers that blow past you in a rush of diesel stench. Compound sentences are the big diesels of the grammar world. You've got a 500 cat engine lugging up to 80,000 pounds of cargo down the road at 70 miles an hour; you might want to know a little bit about it. A compound sentence is exactly what the word implies, more than one. I went to the store and bought some film. That's a simplistic compound sentence. You've got the driver, "I," and two engines, "went" and "bought." There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but a compound sentence is a sentence and a phrase or another sentence hitched together with a conjunction of some sort. Our fifth wheel in the previous case was a word "and." Sometimes we use punctuation. Now punctuation can get a little tricky. If you slap together a complete sentence and a phrase you can use a comma to do it. I am a gorgeous, incredibly smart woman, noticeably vain, too. Noticeably vain is what we call a dependent clause or a phrase. It needs to have the first part of the sentence in order to make sense. Now if you slap together two complete sentences, we call those independent clauses, then you have to use a conjunction or a semi-colon. It looks cool, but a comma is wrong. Like when a tire blows off a big rig and slams into someone's windshield, a comma splice is bad news. I am such an egotistical woman; everyone loves me anyway. Easy, right? Just look to see how many complete sentences you have and you'll know whether or not to use a comma or a semi-colon.
In the space of a few minutes I gave you a crash course in how to drive a car. Whoops. I mean in how to use basic English grammar. It's not nearly as hard as English teachers make it out to be. Who ever diagrammed a sentence in real life anyway? My boss never once said Muffin, copy these, file these, mail these, and diagram these sentences by two o'clock or you're fired. Understanding what you're using is a good way to begin understanding how to use it. Now, there's a lot more to grammar and punctuation, but the basics aren't that hard at all. We only have three basic parts to a sentence, the subject, the predicate, and the object. We have a few things to spiffy up the sentence so maybe you can sell it to a used car lot for more than a few hundred bucks. Modifiers are good for making things look classy. We also have the ability to slap sentences together and make them compound. Otherwise "See Dick Run" would be classical literature.
And if Mrs. Sullivan is reading this, you don't know me, I wasn't in your class, and I'm not even from your state. I'm from, er, New Zealand. Yeah. It's great down here.
