Download writing cheat sheet

Artuso/English
WRITING CHEAT SHEET
A nice list of IMPORTANT things to know!
Noun
Nouns are people, places or things.
Example: mother (person); restaurant (place); trombone (thing)
Proper Noun
Names of specific people, places and things. Proper nouns are always capitalized.
Example: Katharine Hepburn, France, Golden Gate Bridge
Common Noun
If it’s not a proper noun, then it’s a common noun.
Example: boy, home, pencil
Abstract Noun
Consisting of intangible qualities, abstract nouns consist of ideas and qualities.
Example: freedom, fear, integrity
Adjective
Used for descriptive purposes, an adjective is a word that modifies or qualifies a noun or a
pronoun.
Example: blue trucks; forty-five trucks; the big truck
Verb
A verb expresses action or a state of being.
Example: He ran to the store (action). They are funny (state of being).
Linking Verb
A linking verb connects the subject to a predicate noun, which renames the subject, or a
predicate adjective, which describes the subject.
Example: Julia Roberts is a movie star. (Movie star renames the subject, Julia Roberts.)
Example: The apple is rotten. (Rotten describes the subject, apple.)
Adverbs
Modifying a verb, an adjective or another adverb, adverbs tell where, when, how, why,
under what circumstances and to what extent. Adverbs usually end in –ly, with some
exceptions.
Examples:
He drove nearby. [where]
He drove yesterday. [when]
He drove carefully. [how]
Gerund
Always ending with the suffix –ing, a gerund is a verbal noun.
Example: Swimming is my favorite sport. (Swimming, although a verb in most instances,
acts as the sentence’s subject.)
Pronouns
A word that takes the place of a noun in a sentence, there are only about 100 pronouns.
The noun replaced by a pronoun is called its antecedent.
Examples: I, me, my, mine, you, your, yours, he, him, his, she, her, hers, it, its, we, us, our,
ours, they, them, their, theirs
Prepositions
A word that comes before a noun or pronoun, a preposition creates a phrase that modifies
another word in the sentence. The noun or the pronoun is called the object of the
preposition, and the phrase that is created is called a prepositional phrase.
Example: She spilled the drink on him.
Prepositions include: about, above, after, as, at, before, behind, below, concerning, despite,
down, during, for, in, near, out, over, past, since, to, on, toward, under, until, with
Conjunctions
Like a preposition, a conjunction shows the relationship between parts of a sentence.
Example: Steve and Sarah grew vegetables in their garden, but they didn’t grow fruits.
Example: Unless we’re lucky, we aren’t going to get there before the concert starts.
Example: We will be neither swayed nor delayed in our deliberations