• Pick three words to describe yourself to someone who doesn’t know you. They might be nouns, they might be adjectives.

• Once you’ve picked them, ask yourself these questions: Are these words generic and somewhat vague (e.g. “writer”) or are they specific and precise (e.g. “novelist,” “poet,” “journalist,” “compulsive scribbler”)?

• Use the thesaurus on the desks and look up your words. Can you find even more precise words that give someone a much clearer picture of you?

Introduction to GRAMMAR STUDY Pre-AP English II

So…Why do we have Parts of Speech?• The idea that there are “parts of speech” goes back to the ancient Greeks and

Romans, but eighteenth-century British grammarians decided on nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections.

• These categories have been generally accepted for the last two and a half centuries, in spite of the fact that some words don’t fit neatly into syntactical devices.

• Consider the word “fancy.” I can fancy (verb) a pair of leather boots, choose fancy (adjective) high heels, and entertain a fancy (noun) about being chic.

• But, perfect fit or not, the parts of speech sill give us a way to talk about words.

So, we’re starting with nouns…

Almost every English sentence contains at least one noun. They are indispensable when it comes to portraying a character or painting. What is a noun? What is the difference between a concrete and an abstract noun?

Consider the noun “fruit” – How many more specific synonyms can you come up with? Write as many as you can in one minute.Is one of them “berry”? http://www.buzzle.com/articles/types-of-berries-list-of-different-kinds-of-berries.html#true-berries

Nouns: Continued

Underline the nouns on the handout.• How many proper nouns are there? • Do you notice compound nouns, some of them open (bus ride) and

some of them closed (daylight)? • Would you agree that Theroux exploits nouns to create this scene?

Nouns: Continued

When we study the parts of speech, we are working on becoming more precise writers.

Notice the detail Thomas Pynchon squeezes into a one-paragraph description of Lt. Tyrone Slothrop’s desk, early in Gravity’s Rainbow. Again underline the nouns.

• It hasn’t been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts acks, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop’s mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk … above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including “Jonny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland.”

Write: Nouns are the cornerstones of effective scene-writing. Go sit somewhere interesting. Focus on a specific area that you can see from your vantage point. What is special or evocative about the place? Use concrete, vivid nouns to paint a picture of the place. Carefully choose a few idea/feeling/abstraction nouns to convey what makes the place unusual. Can the place serve as a metaphor for an intangible idea?