Saturday, January 28, 2012

A sentence is a grammatical unit that is composed of one or more clauses and phrases. English has four main sentence types: declarative, interrogative, imperative, and conditional sentences.
  • Declarative Sentences are used to form statements.
  • Interrogative Sentences are used to ask questions.
  • Imperative Sentences are used for commands.
  • Exclamatory Sentences used to express strong feelings.
Here is a site that contains several examples.
http://homeworks-edsci.blogspot.com/2009/09/kinds-of-sentences_15.html

What Makes a Sentence?

Hello fellows! Since our next lesson is about sentences, I want to share with you the basic components of sentences; these are phrases and clauses. A phrase is a group or collection of related words that may have nouns or verbals, but does not include a subject and a verb. While a clause is a collection of words that has a subject that is actively doing a verb. Here are some examples for you to understand phrases and clauses further.

http://www.prismnet.com/~hcexres/style/phrases_clauses.html



Friday, January 27, 2012

Interjections


Hello guys! How are you doing? I am so glad we finally surpassed our first long exam.
I hope we all get good results. :)
Interjection or also known as exclamation is a word used to express a feeling or sentiment of the speaker and is usually placed at the beginning of a sentence. Interjections are commonly followed by an exclamation mark "!".
(e.g "Excuse me!", "Sorry!", "No thank you!", "Oh dear!", "Hey that's mine!")

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Boo(n/m) or Bane?

Last week, I picked up an issue of the "Philippine Collegian", also known as "Kule". An article about 9gag, a comedy website, caught my attention. The article was discussing the pros and cons of the website, and eventually led to this sentence, "It is still too early to tell whether the social implications of the website are truly a boom or a bane." I was pretty sure "boom" should have been "boon". In my lexicon, "boom" is the sound of an explosion while "boon" means "blessing". ("Bane", by the way, informally means "a curse" or something bad in general.) When I got home, I searched the internet to see which of the two words was correct. It got me even more confused. Whenever I searched "boom or bane", the search engine showed results of "boon or bane". I was right; "boon or bane" is being used, but that doesn't necessarily mean that using "boom" is incorrect. I'm not sure whether the search engine is correcting me or that both "boom" and "boon" are accepted. My googling skills have failed me. Maybe Ma'am or you, my classmates, could help me with this.

PS. Sorry for the long post; this is really bothering me. :P

APIR!

I was watching a noon time show (Happy Yipee Yehey) with a friend and during that segment, they were playing a word game where the contestants were given clues about the word and they were to identify the correct word being described. The word was first described as being a word used only in the Filipino language, which means that it has no English counterpart. Another clue was that is it usually done by friends and acquaintances. The last clue said that it involves clapping of hands.

APIR! It has no English counterpart. APPEAR does not mean the same thing though they both sound the same. Apir actually comes from the phrase "up here" which is said with the gesture of giving someone a high five. :)





-ANA MINELLE LAXAMANA

Study Effectively


Our exam is on Monday. We are certain that this exam will not be a piece of a cake, so we will surely have a hard time reviewing our lessons in English. I want to share with you a very helpful link that may help us to study effectively.
http://studenthacks.org/2007/10/12/study-effectively/

The 27th Letter


The ampersand represents the conjunction and. Before, I am fond of using this logogram (smallest meaningful unit of language) without knowing that there are rules on how to use it properly. I thought that it's just for the sake of writing and in shortcut form. In our thesis class, I finally learned that ampersand is used in the following cases:

  • formal names of businesses
  • addressing a couple in writing
  • book and movie titles
  • In APA style, the ampersand is used when citing sources

     
       Source