PRONOUNS, PREPOSITIONS, AND CONJUNCTIONS
Welcome to Book 3: Pronouns, Prepositions, and Conjunctions, a book that
teaches what we should know about the three categories of closed-class words.
There are eight traditional parts
of speech. Five of the categories are open class: noun, verb, adjective,
adverb, and interjection. In open-class categories, new words are frequently
created. These words are often quite flexible; for example, many open-class
words can appear in multiple parts-ofspeech categories simply by taking on
suffixes.
The
three closed-class categories are pronoun,
preposition, and conjunction —also known as the function words. The number of words
in these categories is much smaller than the number of words in the open-class
categories. Closed-class words—like pronouns—are designed to show relationships
between words or sentence parts.
The goal of this book is to provide
a close study of the words contained within the three closed-class categories,
with a focus on those aspects that translate into writing improvement.
This e-book is comprised of five
chapters—a chapter on pronouns, a chapter on prepositions, a chapter on
conjunctions, a chapter on interjections (yes, we sneak them in here), and a
chapter containing test questions based on the material in Chapters 1-4.
Chapters 1-3 are divided into
lessons, numbered 1.1, 1.2, etc. Each lesson concludes with a Your Turn—a practice exercise with which
you can check your learning. For easy reference, a Glossary of Terms appears at
the end of Chapters 1-3.
And with that, let’s begin our study of pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions.
Chapter 1: Pronouns
Closed-class words—like pronouns—are
designed to show relationships between words or sentence parts. Before
launching into a study of pronouns, we should know that pronouns take case and person: the three cases:
subjective, objective, possessive the
three persons: first, second, third
We begin with the
first person. The first person
refers to ourselves— whether one of us or several of us. Moving outward, we
come to …
… the second person. The second person refers to an audience—one or more
people listening to the words we speak or write. Moving outward, we come to …
…
the third person. The third person
refers to others—those not present or those unaware of the words we speak or
write. first-person pronouns: I, me, mine,
my, our, ours, us, we second-person pronouns: you, your, yours third-person pronouns: he, she, it, they, him, her, them, his, her, its, their, hers, theirs
Here in Chapter 1 we’ll learn about
antecedents—pronouns cannot exist
without them. We’ll learn about subjective, objective, possessive, reflexive,
and demonstrative pronouns.
We’ll also learn that the writing
errors that crop up in our writing more often than any other writing errors are
pronoun related. Much of this chapter focuses on avoiding these common errors.
The lessons on avoiding pronoun
errors might be among the most challenging in the ebook; however, once we learn
to navigate safely through the various pronoun errors, our writing will gain an
extra level of competency.
We conclude Chapter 1 with a glossary of key terms.