A Verb! a Verb! I'd Give My Kingdom for a Verb! Parts of Speech Demystified

Warning! The knowledge in this article could seriously enhamce your writing cred. Exposed, demystified and laid bare at last! Here is the Parts-of-Speech For Mannequins explanation you've secretly been waiting for. Wait no more as all is revealed...

1. Adjective. This is a word that adds a description to an object, person, place etc.

Example: 'Mary's house had a lovely blue door'. 'Door' is the object whilst 'lovely' and 'blue' describe what sort of door it is, These are adjectives that describe said door. Simple, eh?

2. Verb. As my old English teacher wisely said "A verb is a 'doing' word". It indicates movement; something going on. And here's the clincher: a word is a verb if you can put the word 'to' in front of it and it still makes sense. So we can have: to fly, to gyrate, to digest, to hallucinate. You can't have 'to digestion', unless you're proposing a toast.

If you've been following along so far, you might perk up and ask: 'What's the difference between fly, flew and flying? You can't say "to flew" can you?' Quite right, but 'flew' is the past tense of 'fly' so it's still a verb. 'Flying' however, describes what an aircraft, for instance, is doing, and is therefore an adjective.

3. Adverb. These are similar to adjectives except that this time they describe a verb. So we can say 'the plane flew swiftly through the sky'. 'Flew' is the 'doing' or action word, 'quickly' describes how the action was done. Again: 'She watched the horse gracefully canter around the course.' 'Canter' is the verb (to canter) and 'gracefully' is the adverb describing how the horse cantered.

4. Article. These are unbelievably simple. Yaawn! An article is one of three little words we use all the time: 'a', 'an' and 'the'. I read recently that they are "used to signal the presence of a noun". Gosh, what does that mean? Put simply it means they go before the name of something, like: 'a brick flew out of his hand...' Or: 'the brick hit Rodney on the nose.' Or: 'an brick fell off the wall'. No, no that's not right. We use 'an' when the next word starts with a vowel. OK, so: 'an extruded brick fell off the wall'. (Yes, there really are such things - I looked it up.) 'A' and 'an' are known as indefinite articles because they could refer to just any old brick, whereas 'the' is the definite article when we're talking about a specific brick.

5. Noun. This just means it's the name of an object or person, such as: door, bicycle, sandwich, skyscraper. Or it could be a person: Bill, Maisy, Trayci, Algernon, Kerryn. How easy is that?

6. Pronoun. A substitute for a noun: he, she, it, that. So instead of: 'Trayci stamped on Algernon's foot' (the little minx!), we could say 'she stamped on Algernon's foot' providing it is clear who the 'she' was in the first place. We can't have readers thinking it was Maisy, can we? She would never do such a thing.

7. Preposition. The secret here is the word hidden within 'preposition'. Got it? Yes, it's the word 'position'. A preposition describes where something (a noun) is situated (its position) in relation to something else (another noun). Not so simple this, but a couple of examples should make it clear:

'The telephone (noun) was on (preposition) the table (noun). 'The telephone gyrated gracefully three feet above (preposition) the table.' (Fantasy writers take note!)

8. Conjunction. Conjunctions such as 'and', 'or', 'for', 'because', or 'yet' are words that join words, phrases, and clauses together. There are more of these than you can shake a past participal at so we won't go too deep. And to make matters worse you can have different types of conjunctions. Scary.

Let's be satisfied with: Bread 'and' butter; I love Mary's door 'because' it's my favourite colour; They could find neither hair 'nor' hide of him.

Besides, I'm nearly out of single quotes.

9. Interjection. One of my favourite parts of speech this. Is it! Gosh! I didn't know that! Yes, dear reader, these remarks are interjections because they show surprise. They are exclamations, and they can stand alone even though they are often not proper sentences. Amazing!

So there you have it. You can go out into the literary world proudly confident that you can now amaze your friends and grandchildren with your arcane knowledge. Just don't show off too much. No-one likes a clever cloggs.