ABSTRACT
Many people hate grammatical terms, but the fact remains that criminal justice professionals need to know the terms in order to deal with them. There is no need to go to the other extreme, however, and study too many fine points in grammar. To determine what makes up a correct sentence, criminal justice professionals need to investigate the parts of speech and their varying uses, the subject–verb–direct object pattern, and the different types of clauses and phrases. Few people seem to realize that a word may become a different part of speech, depending on its use in a sentence. Many reports incorrectly use the present tense for the past tense verb, often because the present tense sounds very similar to the past tense. Many who teach English as a second language find that students have difficulty using prepositions and their objects with the terms that are usually found in report writing.
