Monday, October 20, 2008

Week 8 - May I Propose a Preposition for Your Sentence?

We're back at the language excavation site!

ocean scene

Digging deep and uncovering more language building blocks!Layers

About, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, ... and so the Essentials (and Foundations) preposition chant goes!

These simple little words are called prepositions.

Here some helpful preposition and prepositional phrase facts:

  1. Prepositions relate a noun or a pronoun to other words in a sentence.
  2. Prepositions will always be followed by an object of the preposition (noun or pronoun) thus creating a prepositional phrase.
  3. A prepositional phrase that answers an adverb question is called an adverbial phrase.
  4. A prepositional phrase that answers an adjective question is called an adjectival phrase.

Do IT!

Taking our core, tried-and-true sentence:

Jesus wept.

... with the goal of making our sentence more interesting and informative, let's have some fun with prepositions and prepositional phrases.

When? --> After prayer, Jesus wept.

Where? --> Among the people, Jesus wept.

When we put a prepositional phrase at the beginning of sentence like this, we call it a prepositional opener. This is an IEW sentence opener and is a simple, stylistic writing tool.

Now you do it!

  1. Pull out your list of prepositions

  2. Create a simple sentence

  3. See how many prepositions you can use to create interesting prepositional phrases that make your simple sentence, simply sensational!

EEL Extra! for Prepositions EEL Extra - Prepositions.

2 comments:

  1. I am smiling because "of your last comment". I hyphenated the PP.
    :-)

    I love my camera Nikon P80 but if you can get a SLR you will be more happy. I have a bridge camera which is not a point and shoot but it doesn't have the speed of an SLR. I don't know what your budget is but after I bought mine I found quite a few good deals on Craigs list. If you can afford an SLR that would be my choice. For the time being I am very happy with my camera.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh, this is going to be a good lesson when we get to prepositions in grammar this year! : )

    Thank you for your sweet, sweet comment today. It added so much to my post.

    ReplyDelete

So ... how about you?