Some prepositions help describe relationships between objects and their locations in space. David explains how!
Some prepositions help describe moments in time. Learn more and enhance your powers of time wizardry!
We use the progressive aspect to express that a verb action is ongoing, as in "I am eating.".
An antecedent is “the thing that came before”. When you use a pronoun, it’s standing in for a word you used previously—that’s the antecedent. Join us as we demonstrate how to make sure that your pronouns and antecedents match up with one another: that’s called agreement!
The difference between something being singular or plural is what we call 'grammatical number' in English. Here's how that idea applies to pronouns!
Learn how to use commas to punctuate a written list of people, things, actions, or events.
A sentence fragment is a chunk of language that hasn’t made it all the way to being a working sentence; it might be missing a verb, or there might not be a subject. Learn how to turn a fragment into a sentence in this video!
Reflexive pronouns, like "myself" or "herself," show when the object of a sentence is also the subject of a sentence. Examples include "I saw myself in the mirror" or "We bought ourselves a snack at the farmer's market." .
Relative adverbs connect chunks of sentences together. Find out how that works!
A relative pronoun is a word like “that” or “which” or “who”, so a relative clause is a clause that begins with a relative pronoun. In the sentence “The dragon who breathed blue fire has retired,” “who breathed blue fire” is a relative clause. Learn more about these constructions by watching the video!
We use the relative pronouns to connect clauses together, like "the man *who sold the world* is coming over for dinner." David, KA's Grammar Fellow, explains.
A run-on sentence doesn’t separate any of its independent clauses with the punctuation that it needs, and a comma splice incorrectly separates two independent clauses with a comma, instead of a comma-and-coordinating-conjunction.
David and Paige, KA’s resident grammarians, talk about how to address and sign off on letters using commas!
We use semicolons to punctuate a complex list, which is when list items contain commas. For example, “I visited Paris, France; Paris, Texas; and Paris, Illinois.” Paige explains.
Verb aspect allows a speaker to give even more information about when an event took place or is going to take place. The simple aspect of a verb is the same as its past, present, and future tenses, such as "I walked," "I walk," and "I will walk." .
A simple sentence contains one independent clause. A compound sentence contains more than one! Put another way: a simple sentence contains a subject and a predicate, but a compound sentence contains more than one subject and more than one predicate.
This video will teach you all about the different ways you can use the sound of words for effect. Alliteration is when you use a bunch of similar consonants in a row; assonance is when you use a bunch of similar vowel sounds in a row; onomatopoeia is basically sound effects. You'll see.
Before we get any further with pronouns, let's cover what the difference between a subject and an object pronoun is, because the distinction between those two concepts will start coming up a good deal.
A subject is the noun phrase that drives the action of a sentence; in the sentence “Jake ate cereal,” Jake is the subject. The direct object is the thing that the subject acts upon, so in that last sentence, “cereal” is the direct object; it’s the thing Jake ate. An indirect object is an optional part of a sentence; it’s the recipient of an action. In the sentence “Jake gave me some cereal,” the word “me” is the indirect object; I’m the person who got cereal from Jake.
A subject is the noun or pronoun-based part of a sentence, and a predicate is the verb-based part that the subject performs. Let’s explore how that works in context.