Nouns are words that define a person, place or thing. The things nouns name include ideas, items, qualities, feelings, actions and animals. "Brian Beckford" is the noun in the following sentence: "Brian Beckford is our mentor."
A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. The pronoun in the following sentence is "he:" "He taught us how to play golf."
Verbs express the actions, events or state of being of the subject. Verbs come in three tense forms: present, past and past participle. Present tense is for present actions, past tense is for past actions and past participle is formed by adding "d "or "ed" to the base form of the word and often is identical with past tense.
Adverbs are a word or group of words that modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs. The three classes of adverbs are simple adverbs, interrogative adverbs and conjunctive adverbs. Simple adverbs are modifiers. They tell time, place, manner, degree or number. Interrogative adverbs, as the name implies, interrogate, ask questions. Conjunctive adverbs are independent clause connectors. When using a conjunctive adverb, place a semicolon before it.
Adjectives are words that modify a noun. Some nouns, when given endings like "ory," "ish," "ar," "en," and "ly," can be used as adjectives. An example of this is the word "bullish" in the following sentence: "Brian spoke of her in a bullish manner."
Prepositions show relationships between an object and another word. The three types of prepositions are simple prepositions, compound prepositions and phrasal prepositions. Simple prepositions are single words like "before," "on" or "with." Compound prepositions are compound words like "without" or "underneath." Phrasal prepositions are prepositions that are phrases like "close to."
Conjunctions link clauses, phrases and words. The types of conjunctions are coordinating conjunctions, correlative conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions. Coordinating conjunctions connect clauses with the same grammatical function. Examples of coordinating conjunctions include: "and," "or," "nor" and "so." Correlative conjunctions are two coordinating conjunctions that work together to connect sentence elements. Examples of correlative conjunctions include "not...but," "either...or" and "whether...or." Subordinating conjunctions connect elements with mismatched grammatical functions. They can be an independent and a dependent clause for example. Examples of subordinating clauses include "because," "since," "where," "so that," "except that" and "though."
Interjections are words placed in a sentence to express surprise, a strong emotion or to gain attention. Use a comma with a mild interjection and an exclamation point with a strong interjection.