Success Requires Command of One's Language
By Stu Leventhal - #anewtale
Seneca said, "Men learn while they teach."
George Santayana said, "The wisest mind has something left to learn."
Many seek fortune and fame in all kinds of various ways. People travel far and wide looking for the secret to success only years later to find that they carried the magic with them all the time.
Whatever career or personal ambitions you wish to pursue, the one skill that is always worth your improving is your mastery of your language. Enriching your vocabulary will always make you sound more polished, experienced and worldly. You can communicate with better results when you have more words to choose to use.
Words are power! Make no bones about this; poor language skills are a social barrier.
Your career or personal relationships can be brought to a screeching halt if you cannot express your ideas and thoughts smoothly. Having something important to say is not enough; that is only the first part. You have to be able to say what you are thinking and feeling. Advancing your abilities to speak clearly and write more effectively will always help you in any type of endeavor or goal you wish to achieve.
Awkward language skills are a handicap and a main cause of failure in business as well as at school.
How much do you really know about using; nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, prepositions, conjunction and interjection? What about grammar?
Becoming a great; wordsmith, speaker, teacher, leader, boss, composer, yes even lover starts with thoroughly mastering the essentials of explaining, enunciation, paraphrasing, defining, clarifying, describing, presenting, verbalizing, putting into words... COMMANDING YOUR LANGUAGE!
ANATOMY OF A FINELY WRITTEN SENTENCE
WHAT IS A SENTENCE?
By Stu Leventhal
To be a great creative writer, you obviously must know how to put together a proper sentence. String a few well designed sentences together and you are on your way to becoming a great author! Sure there is plenty to be said about applauding an author’s imagination but there is also a lot to be said for skills of structure and the clarity of a writer’s messages too!
Words are the building blocks of great sentences and you cannot have great creative writing without sentences. Therefore, mastering how to put together a proper sentence can be quite valuable to any type of scribe. I have often heard professors and scholars define a good sentence as a being a group of words expressing a complete thought. What exactly qualifies as a complete thought is where the debating usually comes in!
Shall we dissect a sentence or two and see what they are made of? Do you want to learn how to write smoother, more complete and easier to understand sentences. Let’s first look at the parts of a sentence. Understanding these parts will help you elevate your writing!
Every sentence has two basic parts:
1. Subject – The subject of a sentence is the part of the sentence that is being talked about.
2. Predicate – The predicate of a sentence is the part of the sentence that talks about the subject.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John ran after the baseball.
Subject: John
Predicate: ran after the baseball.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: The pie is on the table.
Subject: pie
Predicate: is on the table.
Identifying the subject and the predicate in our examples above are quite easy because the sentences are basic and simple. Therefore we call these simple subjects and simple predicates because they consist of single words or single groups of words depicting their subject or predicate. Obviously in speech and text we are often presented with much longer and more complicated sentences where it is not so easily apparent. For studying and analyzing purposes teachers have further classified or named the two sentence parts of these more complex sentence; compound subjects and compound verbs. Compound subjects and compound verbs can usually be recognized by the use of the connector words ‘and’ and ‘or’.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: The boys and girls sang and danced.
Compound subject: boys and girls
Compound verb: sang and danced
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: Mom and Pop shops and big corporations struggled and adopted.
Compound subject: Mom and Pop shops and big corporations
Compound verb: struggled and adopted
*Sometimes we wish to expand the thought contained in our sentences to make them more complete. We do this by adding ‘complements’ to our subject and predicate. Let’s dissect an example.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John fought.
Subject: John
Predicate/verb: fought
EXPANDED EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John fought the reigning champion of the past three seasons.
Complement: the reigning champion of the past three seasons.
It is easy to recognize how the complement above expands the simpler thought making the sentence much more complete and useful for communicating. The complement assures we are not left wondering who or what John fought. There are many types of sentence complements. The type of complement used above is called the ‘direct object complement’ because it receives the action of the verb or answers the question of to whom or to what the verb or action was applied to.
Can you recognize the subject, predicate and complements of the following sentence?
Bob’s mother gave Bob an emerald tie pin for a birthday present.
*Hint, find the verb first!
That is correct, ‘gave’ is the predicate/verb. Now it is easy to find the subject of the sentence because the subject is the person, place, thing or idea that is performing the action. Correct again, the subject is Bob’s mother because she is the one who gave. Can you see how ‘Bob’s mother gave’ is a complete thought that could stand all by itself? That tells you that the rest of the sentence is made of complements. Who did Bob’s mother give to? She gave to Bob. Bob is a complement. What did she give? She gave an emerald tie pin. The emerald tie pin is a complement.
Wow! You are catching on to this sentence structure stuff fast! Stay tuned for lesson number two!
By Stu Leventhal
To be a great creative writer, you obviously must know how to put together a proper sentence. String a few well designed sentences together and you are on your way to becoming a great author! Sure there is plenty to be said about applauding an author’s imagination but there is also a lot to be said for skills of structure and the clarity of a writer’s messages too!
Words are the building blocks of great sentences and you cannot have great creative writing without sentences. Therefore, mastering how to put together a proper sentence can be quite valuable to any type of scribe. I have often heard professors and scholars define a good sentence as a being a group of words expressing a complete thought. What exactly qualifies as a complete thought is where the debating usually comes in!
Shall we dissect a sentence or two and see what they are made of? Do you want to learn how to write smoother, more complete and easier to understand sentences. Let’s first look at the parts of a sentence. Understanding these parts will help you elevate your writing!
Every sentence has two basic parts:
1. Subject – The subject of a sentence is the part of the sentence that is being talked about.
2. Predicate – The predicate of a sentence is the part of the sentence that talks about the subject.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John ran after the baseball.
Subject: John
Predicate: ran after the baseball.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: The pie is on the table.
Subject: pie
Predicate: is on the table.
Identifying the subject and the predicate in our examples above are quite easy because the sentences are basic and simple. Therefore we call these simple subjects and simple predicates because they consist of single words or single groups of words depicting their subject or predicate. Obviously in speech and text we are often presented with much longer and more complicated sentences where it is not so easily apparent. For studying and analyzing purposes teachers have further classified or named the two sentence parts of these more complex sentence; compound subjects and compound verbs. Compound subjects and compound verbs can usually be recognized by the use of the connector words ‘and’ and ‘or’.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: The boys and girls sang and danced.
Compound subject: boys and girls
Compound verb: sang and danced
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: Mom and Pop shops and big corporations struggled and adopted.
Compound subject: Mom and Pop shops and big corporations
Compound verb: struggled and adopted
*Sometimes we wish to expand the thought contained in our sentences to make them more complete. We do this by adding ‘complements’ to our subject and predicate. Let’s dissect an example.
EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John fought.
Subject: John
Predicate/verb: fought
EXPANDED EXAMPLE SENTENCE: John fought the reigning champion of the past three seasons.
Complement: the reigning champion of the past three seasons.
It is easy to recognize how the complement above expands the simpler thought making the sentence much more complete and useful for communicating. The complement assures we are not left wondering who or what John fought. There are many types of sentence complements. The type of complement used above is called the ‘direct object complement’ because it receives the action of the verb or answers the question of to whom or to what the verb or action was applied to.
Can you recognize the subject, predicate and complements of the following sentence?
Bob’s mother gave Bob an emerald tie pin for a birthday present.
*Hint, find the verb first!
That is correct, ‘gave’ is the predicate/verb. Now it is easy to find the subject of the sentence because the subject is the person, place, thing or idea that is performing the action. Correct again, the subject is Bob’s mother because she is the one who gave. Can you see how ‘Bob’s mother gave’ is a complete thought that could stand all by itself? That tells you that the rest of the sentence is made of complements. Who did Bob’s mother give to? She gave to Bob. Bob is a complement. What did she give? She gave an emerald tie pin. The emerald tie pin is a complement.
Wow! You are catching on to this sentence structure stuff fast! Stay tuned for lesson number two!