Contents
Guide
Page List
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Contents
Introduction
Writing skills are usually the most difficult skills to acquire in a language.
Contents
Introduction
Writing skills are usually the most difficult skills to acquire in a language.
This is particularly true in a foreign language. The goal of this book is to reduce that difficulty as it guides you through the various types of structures in the English language and illustrates how those structures combine to make sentences. Naturally, in order to acquire writing skills you have to write. Therefore, you will be provided with an abundance of writing exercises. Some will require a small variation in a given sentence. Others will provide you with a series of words that you form into an appropriate sentence.
And you will have plenty of opportunity for coming up with original sentences of your own. This development of writing better English sentences moves gradually and with careful explanation from the least complex activity to the most complex. In addition to the illustrations of how structures combine to form sentences and to the exercises for practice, an Answer Key is provided at the end of the book. It includes not only the correct answers for the exercises but also sample sentences, with which you can compare your original sentences. The final chapter, , is a Progress Check, which can help you determine what areas of structure you might want to review in order to improve how you use certain grammatical concepts. Good sentence writing is not an impossible task, but it requires analysis and practice and a willingness to apply concepts and rules consistently.
Let this book guide you, and you will discover a new confidence for writing more successfully in English. Have fun and write well!
Declarative sentences and word order Declarative sentences in English consist of a subject and predicate. The verb in the predicate is conjugated appropriately for the subject and in a specific tense:
subject + predicate Mary + speaks English. Lets look at some examples that illustrate this. Declarative sentences can have a singular or plural noun as their subject and can be followed by a verb in any tense and by the complement of the sentence. John repairs the car.
The boys ran into the forest.
Other declarative sentences use a pronoun as their subject, and again the tense of the sentence can vary. Since English verbs can show an incomplete action or one in progress (he is going) or a completed or habitual action (he goes), when changing tenses, you have to conform to the type of action of the verb. For example: he is going, he was going, he has been going
he goes, he went, he has gone The conjugation of English verbs is, with few exceptions, a relatively simple matter, but using the proper tenses of verbs is something else. It is particularly important to understand the tense differences between verbs that describe an action in progress and verbs that describe a completed or habitual action.
Incomplete actions
Lets look at some sentences that illustrate the meaning of incomplete actionsor ones in progressin the present, past, and future tenses. (To the right of the examples are italicized clarifications that will help you fully understand the example sentences.)