ABSTRACT
This chapter helps students to really dig in to their basic sentences by adding modifiers to nouns and verbs, rather than tacking on basic sentences. In the language of grammar, a phrase is a unit of two or more words that make sense together without forming a clause. A noun or pronoun lives in the subject. A verb lives in the predicate. There are two devices that expand on a verb: helping verbs and adverbial structures. The two basic helping verbs are forms of have and are: I write, I wrote, I have written, I am writing. Have created what everybody calls perfect tenses. When writing about literature, one uses the present tense, as if telling the reader about the story as though it is happening now. Adverbial phrases and clauses, just like single word adverbs, do the same jobs, but they do so as word clusters. Nouns and verbs are expandable through pre- and post-modifiers, single words, phrases, clauses.
