1. Parts of speech - overview

2. Why learning the parts of speech is important
There are thousands of rules in the English language. In order to be excellent writers, we need to understand these rules and follow them when we write.
However, there is no way to memorize all these rules; our brains just aren’t capable of that.

3. Why learning the parts of speech is important
Luckily, there are usage books, dictionaries, web sites, etc. that are dedicated to recording these rules for us.
However, we must know what certain words mean (like “preposition” or “intransitive verb”) to understand what these usage books, dictionaries, web sites, etc. tell us.

4. Why learning the parts of speech is important
For example, you open your math book every day and see problems like “multiply 32 and 17” and you know how to get the correct answer.
Imagine how much longer your math book would be if the book had to explain that “multiply” means “take the two numbers and find an answer equal to the sum of a column containing one number repeated the number of times of the other number” (from Merriam-Webster’s School Dictionary).
Just like the above definition of “multiply” sounds really confusing at first, so will our definitions of some of our parts of speech.

5. Why learning the parts of speech is important
However, once we know what it means to “multiply,” we can figure out a lot more stuff. For example, it makes understanding exponents a lot easier.
Just like with math, once we know how the different parts of speech work, we can figure out how to become better writers much quicker.

6. Real-life example
A friend of mine is applying to medical school, so he has to write a bunch of essays about why he would be a good doctor so that schools will accept him.
Unfortunately (for me), he sometimes sends me these essays and asks me to proofread them for him. Last week he sent me one with this sentence in it:
“A few years later, I was taken off medication and I have never had a seizure since.”

7. Real-life example
I thought the sentence was missing a comma between “medication” and “and.” However, adding that comma made the sentence too choppy, and I had to make sure I was correct.
So I opened up a usage guide and found this:

9. Even though this might sound confusing, I know exactly what a “subject” is, what “coordinated main clauses” are, what “independent clauses” are, and what a “compound predicate” is.
And, you guys will eventually know what this means, too.
Because I was able to understand what this meant, I was able to edit this part of his paper and give him advice on how to recast the sentence.

10. What we will learn
In total, there are eight parts of speech. They are:
Nouns
Pronouns
Adjectives
Verbs
Adverbs
Prepositions
Conjunctions
Interjection
We will not only learn about each part of speech, but we will also learn about different categories within each part of speech.
And so, let’s get started with learning about nouns.