PARTS OF SPEECH 2 Week 7

COMBINING SENTENCES  Short, choppy sentences can be powerful when used occasionally, but when strung together, they are boring and jarring. Add rhythm and variety to your writing by varying your sentence lengths. One way to do this is to combine short sentences.  Original: The sailboats were in the lagoon. These boats were small. They rocked. They rocking was dangerous. The water was rough. It was rising, too.  Combined: the small sailboats rocked dangerously in the rough, rising waters of the lagoon.  Now you have combined six short sentences into one well-written and fluent sentence.  Notice that the combined sentence sounds more sophisticated because it avoids unnecessary repetition choppy stops/starts. Notice that the key words inserted into the base sentence work as modifiers- adjectives & adverbs.

COMBINING SENTENCES  Sometimes, the key words change form when you combine sentences.  Original: The restaurant’s walls are decorated with paintings. They are paintings of the region. The paintings are of the sea. They were painted by local artists.  Combined: The regional seascapes on the restaurant’s walls were painted by local artists.  Original: The part is pretty. It stands out among many scenic towns along the coast.  Combined: The pretty port stands out among the many scenic costal towns.

STEP-BY-STEP  To combine a group of short sentences: 1. Find the sentence that gives the most information. 2. In the other sentences, look for single words that can be picked up and inserted into the sentence you chose in Step Insert the single words where they make sense. You may need to slightly change the words you’re moving. 4. Read the combined sentence aloud to hear if it sounds natural.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITY  Combine the groups of sentences on the page into single sentences with adjectives and adverbs. Drop some words, and change the form of others, as need.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITY  With a partner, improve the paragraphs about the English king Richard III for a history report. Look for opportunities to combine sentences. Compare your new paragraphs with those other pairs of students.

PREPOSITIONS  Prepositions link key words in your sentences  They never stand alone  They connect a noun or a pronoun (and its modifiers, if any) to another word in the sentence to form a prepositional phrase  The crowd stood along the aisles.  I spoke on behalf of the class.  They dared to answer their cell phones right under their teacher’s nose.  Some prepositions contain several words  These are called compound prepositions  In spite of the snowstorm, we drove to the movies.  I had to pay for the popcorn in addition to the movie.  A word that you may first identify as a preposition is actually an adverb if it is not part of a prepositional phrase.  Adverb: The bully bragged, “I’ve been around.”  Preposition: We strolled around the block.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITY  Underline all the preposition in parentheses that make sense for the sentence. Notice how the meanings of each sentence change, depending on which preposition you choose.

IN-CLASS ACTIVITY  Fill in the blank with PREP if the underlined word is functioning as a preposition and with ADV is the underlined word is functioning as an adverb.

JOURNAL 3