Posts Tagged ‘grammar’

Proofread your writings using WhiteSmoke

July 14th, 2010 admin

Speak­ing Eng­lish lan­guage is dif­fer­ent from writ­ing it with­out any spelling and gram­mat­i­cal mis­takes. You need sheer prac­tice to excel your­self in Eng­lish lan­guage. This is pos­si­ble by con­tin­ual read­ing, writ­ing, speak­ing Eng­lish, I mean, though you do not know it per­fectly, try to prac­tice it reg­u­larly. It is not always pos­si­ble to do ask someone’s help to cor­rect your mails or writ­ings for spelling and gram­mar errors. Hence, you should take help of soft­ware and inter­net who can solve your prob­lem. Using of MS Word and some sites like spellchecker can solve your prob­lem to an extent but they are very lim­ited. Lack of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is the main draw­back of these tools.

I have found soft­ware which will solve these prob­lems. It com­prises sev­eral writ­ing tools, such as a dic­tio­nary, a the­saurus and ready-made let­ter tem­plates; its core fea­ture is its advanced Eng­lish gram­mar checker. It works on Nat­ural Lan­guage Pro­cess­ing tech­nol­ogy. WhiteSmoke can­not detect all errors. Please remem­ber that this soft­ware is not going to solve all your prob­lems com­pletely but this will han­dle all the major issues in your writ­ings and con­verts your un-interesting and errors into pro­fes­sional writ­ings. This soft­ware is com­pat­i­ble with all the oper­at­ing sys­tems. If you want to use WhiteSmoke, then you have to open word proces­sor appli­ca­tions like Notepad or MS Word, high­light the text you want to proof­read and then click on F2 but­ton. Whitesmoke will con­nect to the online server and gives some sug­ges­tion based on the sce­nario. There are many ver­sions in this soft­ware, check out which suits you and get a copy of it!

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Prepositions

March 19th, 2010 shylock

Why prepo­si­tions are important?

Unfor­tu­nately, most of our early encoun­ters with writ­ten form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is via Instant Mes­sag­ing or SMS ser­vices. These modes of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are essen­tially one to one form of online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. These forms of online com­mu­ni­ca­tions are pri­mar­ily per­sonal in nature. Offi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion calls for proper chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion fol­low­ing the rules of gram­mar. To achieve proper gram­mar, one has to iden­tify the basic parts of speech. Prepo­si­tions are one of the eight parts of speech.

What is a preposition?

Prepo­si­tions are link­ers. They link a groups of words. Nouns, pro­nouns and phrases to other parts in a sen­tence. Prepo­si­tions indi­cate the rela­tion between things in a sen­tence. A prepo­si­tion locates a noun and links it to the other part of the sen­tence. Sim­ply put, prepo­si­tion is a part of speech which intro­duces a prepo­si­tional phrase.
Let’s exam­ine some exam­ples:-
1) The cat sleeps on the sofa.
Here on is the prepo­si­tion and it intro­duces the prepo­si­tional phrase “the sofa”.
2) We drove to the store.
Here to is the prepo­si­tion and it intro­duces the prepo­si­tional phrase “the store”
Golden Rule:
Prepo­si­tion can only be fol­lowed by a noun or a sen­tence depend­ing upon the preposition.

Par­ti­cle and Prepositions

Prepo­si­tions do not alter the mean­ing of the verbs pre­ced­ing them. Par­ti­cles are phrasal verbs i.e. they are a part of the phrase.
Jack ran up the bill.
In this exam­ple, ran up is a phrase. Hence here up is a par­ti­cle.
Jack ran up the hill.
Here, up is used as a preposition.

Prepo­si­tion


Con­fus­ing Prepositions

Let’s exam­ine some of the con­fus­ing prepo­si­tions.
1) At/On/In
At prepo­si­tion is used to men­tion a par­tic­u­lar time. E.g. At mid­night.
On prepo­si­tion is used for cer­tain dates and days .E.g. On his anniver­sary.
In prepo­si­tion is used for period of time. E.g. In an year.

2) For/While/During/Since
For prepo­si­tion is used to express a period of time. E.g. I have been on this case for two years now.
While prepo­si­tion is used when more than one action is involved. E.g. The thief sneaked into their houses while they were holidaying.

Dur­ing prepo­si­tion is used to indi­cate the dura­tion of the action. E.g. He learnt gui­tar dur­ing his sum­mer vacation.

Since prepo­si­tion is used with a spe­cific date or time. E.g. They have been liv­ing here since 1990.

Some Com­mon Prepo­si­tions
• aboard
• about
• above
• across
• after
• against
• along
• amid
• among
• anti
• around
• as
• at
• before
• behind
• below
• beneath
• beside
• besides
• between
• beyond
• but
• by
• con­cern­ing
• con­sid­er­ing
• despite
• down
• dur­ing
• except
• except­ing
• exclud­ing
• fol­low­ing
• for
• from
• in
• inside
• into
• like
• minus
• near
• of
• off
• on
• onto
• oppo­site
• out­side
• over
• past
• per
• plus
• regard­ing
• round
• save
• since
• than
• through
• to
• toward
• towards
• under
• under­neath
• unlike
• until
• up
• upon
• ver­sus
• via
• with
• within
• without

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Dangling Modifiers

March 17th, 2010 shylock

What is a Dan­gling Modifier?

Dan­gling mod­i­fier is a word or a phrase that mod­i­fies the clause inap­pro­pri­ately. A writer may intend to mod­ify the sub­ject, but gram­mar rules seem­ingly mod­ify the object instead. Con­fus­ing? Maybe some exam­ples would help you to appre­ci­ate the prob­lem asso­ci­ated with Dan­gling Modifiers.

Hav­ing fin­ished the assign­ment, the TV was turned on.

Here ‘the TV’ is not the sub­ject of main clause (fin­ished the assigned). “Hav­ing fin­ished” is a clause express­ing action but there are no sub­jects claim­ing this action. In this exam­ple, the TV cant doesn’t qual­ify to be sub­ject because TV sets can’t com­plete assignments.

Hav­ing fin­ished the assign­ment, John turned on the TV.

In this case, we could actu­ally work out the cen­tral idea. But the catch is read­ers shouldn’t be work­ing out the mean­ing. They should appre­ci­ate the writ­ing as it is. In short, dan­gling mod­i­fiers lead to dif­fi­culty in under­stand­ing and some unin­ten­tional humour.

Golden Rules

If at any point of time you draw a chuckle, due to how you have said it rather than what you have said, then it has unfavourable out­comes. Few care­ful steps would go a long way in avoid­ing such mishaps.
Step1: Under­line all the mod­i­fiers in your sen­tences.
Step2: Match all the nouns fol­low­ing your dan­gling mod­i­fiers.
Step3: Ensure that your mod­i­fier and noun goes together log­i­cally. If not, you have a dan­gling mod­i­fier! Name an appro­pri­ate doer of the action as the sub­ject of the clause.
Step4: Rewrite the sen­tence.

Remove Dan­gling Modifiers

“Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang.”
Now, we would apply the above rules in this sen­tence and check for dan­gling mod­i­fiers.
Step1: Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang
Step2: Being asleep, the tele­phone star­tled me when it rang
Step3: The tele­phone can’t go to sleep. So we have a dan­gling mod­i­fier here. Here we have to intro­duce the doer of the action. Let us intro­duce the doer as “I”. Now “I” is the sub­ject of the main clause.
Step4: “Being asleep, I was star­tled when the tele­phone rang.”
Some­times, comb­ing the main clause and the dan­gling phrase helps in resolv­ing the con­flict.
The exper­i­ment was a fail­ure, not hav­ing stud­ied the lab man­ual care­fully.
As it is, the sen­tence would mean that the exper­i­ment failed because the exper­i­ment didn’t read the lab man­ual. This is illog­i­cal.
Apply­ing the above rules, we observe that we need to intro­duce a noun.

They failed the exper­i­ment, not hav­ing stud­ied the lab man­ual carefully.

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Differences between Spoken English and Written English

February 3rd, 2010 admin

There are some very notable dif­fer­ences between writ­ten and spo­ken Eng­lish. Spo­ken Eng­lish, as a lan­guage is quite relaxed. This means that in many occa­sions peo­ple speak and their Eng­lish gram­mar is not quite cor­rect. Often peo­ple will say things like, ‘If I was a boy’ which does not sound too gram­mat­i­cally incor­rect, but in writ­ten form it looks slightly odd. The rea­son is that ‘if’ is already a ‘wish­ing word’ and, as such, needs the sub­junc­tive tense to be used. So the proper writ­ten form of this sen­tence is, ‘If I were a boy’. It is also notable that when one is writ­ing, he/she tends to use words that would not nor­mally be used when speak­ing about the same subject.

Differences between Spoken English and Written English

Dif­fer­ences between Spo­ken Eng­lish and Writ­ten English

It is thus easy when speak­ing Eng­lish to get away with not hav­ing very good gram­mar, but this will show up when the same words are writ­ten down. If one is learn­ing Eng­lish, it is impor­tant to try to make sure that gram­mar is checked. You should make sure that when you are speak­ing Eng­lish you pay atten­tion to gram­mar and gram­mat­i­cal issues. When writ­ing in Eng­lish, ensure that you always check your gram­mar, either using an online gram­mar check­ing pack­age, or just by going through it. But the gram­mar checker is much more reliable.

Try­ing to speak Eng­lish as it is writ­ten helps you make sure that you don’t allow your stan­dard of gram­mar to slip. In spo­ken lan­guage, every­thing we talk will give some mean­ing and the lis­tener is not par­tic­u­lar about the gram­mat­i­cal cor­rect­ness of the lan­guage. He/she is inter­ested only to get the sub­ject but when it comes to writ­ten Eng­lish, every­body will keenly observe all these things and a small mis­take, becomes a big issue. In my opin­ion, peo­ple who write good Eng­lish will def­i­nitely increase their spo­ken Eng­lish skills.

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