Common Nouns

Objective: Use common nouns in sentences. In the last lesson we said that nouns are naming words. Nouns can be broken into two groups: proper nouns and common nouns. We saw that proper nouns name specific people and places. We saw that the things we named were not specific. Nouns that name things in a general way are called common nouns. Is it possible to name people in a general way? Look at the words boy, girl, man, woman, etc. These nouns name people in a general way. Nouns that name people in a general way are common nouns. The things we find around us are normally named in a general way. If you make a list of all the things you use in school, it will look like this: pen, pencil, book, ruler, eraser, bag etc. All these items are general names. They do not name a specific thing. They are common nouns. Common nouns are further divided into count and mass nouns. All the nouns we have listed so far are count nouns. Count nouns can form plurals: boy – boys, girl – girls, man –men, pen –pens etc. Count nouns in the singular take “a” or “the “before them: a boy, a girl, a pen, the boy, the girl, the pen etc. In the plural they take “some” or “the” before them: some boys, some girls, some pens, the boys, the girls, the pens etc. We shall now write sentences in the singular and plural. We shall use the Noun+ verb with –s pattern. a) A boy watches movies. b) A boy washes clothes. c) A boy dries dishes. d) A boy makes toys. Great! You can now make more sentences using the nouns and verbs we had identified. Take note that movies, clothes, dishes and toys are common nouns. Look for more appropriate nouns to use after the verbs. We shall now use Noun + verb without –s pattern. a) Some boys watch movies. b) The boys wash clothes. c) Some boys dry dishes. d) The boys make toys. Make your own sentences following this pattern. Now let us look at mass nouns. These do not have plural forms. We do not use “a” before them. Examples of mass nouns include ink, sugar, salt, sand. They can take “the” or “some” before them: the ink, some ink, the salt, some salt, the sand, some sand. A man bought some ink. A man bought some salt. A man bought some sand. Now make as many sentences using this pattern. In the next post we shall look at other proper nouns.

KCSE FUNCTIONAL WRITING TIPS

FORMAL LETTER Objective: Write a letter through your Principal. Question: You are a candidate at Happy Secondary School in Bubari district. Since there will be no tuition in your school during the August holidays, you decide with the permission of your parents to do your studies at the Teachers Resource Centre (TRC) in your district headquarters. Write a letter through your Principal requesting the District Education Officer (DEO) to allow you to do so. (20 marks) (Courtesy Busia District Mock, 2011) Let’s get one thing very clear: this is not a prediction but an attempt to help you understand how to conduct your revision for question 1,101/1) The first thing you need to understand is the mark distribution in this paper. Make no mistake about this; you are writing the exam to score the highest mark that you possibly can. This question is allocated 20 marks. These 20 marks are divided into 3 sections: format, content and language. Depending on the nature of the question, format attracts between 6 and 8 marks. For this question I have allocated 8 marks. Make sure that for every item you revise you master the format. This way you guarantee yourself 40% of the 20 marks. The format for this question requires that you have 3 addresses. (I advise you use the block format. Therefore all your work will start on the left margin. Any deviation from this will be considered an indented format.)The first address is the sender’s. The question has already given you a school; don’t give the name of a different school. Remember not to include your name in the address. Skip a line and write the date. Skip another line and give the recipient’s address, in this case the DEO. Skip another line and write the word “Through”. Skip another line and write your Principal’s address. Skip a line and write your salutation: Dear Sir/Madam Skip a line and write the regards section. Remember it is “RE” and not “REF” follow this with the subject matter. A good interpretation of the question will be STUDIES at the TRC and underline neatly. The remaining format marks are in the complementary close and signing off. The close for this letter will be “Yours faithfully”. Below it put your legible signature and below that your full name. That’s it. You have the full marks for format. Next you need to earn the content marks. Strictly speaking the content marks are in the question if it has been constructed well. For this question I have allocated 6 marks for content. So what did this examiner want you to include in your letter? A rereading of the question will tell you that you are expected to i. Mention the name of your school ii. Give the reasons why you want to use the TRC iii. Inform the DEO that you have your parents’ permission to use the facility iv. Formally make a request to use the facility NB: two marks for tone usually form part of the content mark. In this case the tone expected should be that of making a request. Do not be worried about this. If you have listed the four items above you will most like be using the right tone. The examiner will be looking for expressions like “I wish to”, “I would like to”. Expressions like “I want”, “give me” will give your letter the wrong tone. You now have 60% of the marks for this question. Finally, let us earn the language marks. In this case I allocated 6 marks. Well we all know that a formal letter should be brief. The examiner’s dilemma is how to give you six marks for writing two lines. My advice: develop three paragraphs. In the introductory paragraph say how you learnt about the facility and state your request. That is all you need to do with the first paragraph. You must now skip a line and start your second paragraph. It is in the second paragraph that you will want to answer the remaining questions. Tell them who you are, why you want to use the facility, in this case you will not have April holiday tuition at your school. Tell them that you have your parents’ blessings and reiterate your request. You must now start your third paragraph. Use your imagination. Remember you want to earn the 6 language marks. Tell them that you are grateful that they developed such a facility. Promise them that you will use their facility conscientiously. Then ask them to give you a response before school’s close. That’s it. If you have used your best English no examiner will hesitate to award you the full mark. Congratulations! If you have written this letter as per the lesson you now have all the 20 marks. It is effort that makes successful students. Thank you.

Nouns

Objective: Use nouns as naming words in sentences. Always make sure that you can define the topic you are studying. So what is a noun? In order to define a noun we will look at what nouns do. Nouns name people, places and things. Therefore nouns are naming words. a) Nouns as names of people Every body in your class has a name. If they did not, it would not be possible to state clearly who you are talking to. Names that talk about a specific person are called proper nouns; therefore, all the names of your friends are proper nouns. All proper nouns start with a capital letter. Now make a list of all your friends. Make sure that each name starts with a capital letter. Names are not very easy to spell, when in doubt ask your friends how to spell their names. I hope you have at least ten names. Now let us take a journey back to one of our lessons on main verbs. Do you remember the verbs that we gave you rules on how to spell them? Well, here is the list: wash, polish, slash, watch, fetch, piss, fix, cry, dry and fly. You will now make sentences in the pattern: Noun + verb ending in –s. Use the names of your friends in the noun position and each one of the verbs above in the verb position. Complete this exercise before you read on. Do your sentences look like these? i. Eugene washes. ii. Joan watches. iii. Jane fetches. iv. Jim pisses. v. Don fixes. vi. Peter cries. vii. Joel dries. viii. Jean flies. b) Nouns as names of places How well do you know Africa? Well the names of towns and countries are proper nouns too. They name specific places. Words that name specific places are proper nouns. An atlas is a reference book most of us avoid. Well, in today’s lesson you will need one. I will name ten capital cities in Africa and you will name the countries they are in. Let’s see how our partnership works, shall we? Nairobi, Cairo, Kampala, Kigali, Lagos, Algiers, Johannesburg, Harare, Kismayu and Khartum. Well, I hope you had fun with your atlas. Find as many capital cities and countries in the world. Just remember that these nouns start in capital letters. c) Nouns as names of things Look around you. Everything you can touch is a noun. Make a list of as many things as possible. These nouns start in small letters. Now look for nouns that you can use to extend these sentences. i. Eugene washes. ii. Joan watches. iii. Jane fetches. iv. Don fixes. v. Joel dries. vi. Jean flies. Your sentences should look like these. i. Eugene washes clothes. ii. Joan watches movies. iii. Jane fetches firewood. iv. Don fixes cars. v. Joel dries dishes. vi. Jean flies kites. Well, we have come to the end of this lesson on nouns. Remember that a noun is a word that names people, places and things. Remember too that nouns that name specific people and places are called proper nouns. For proper nouns the first letter must be a capital letter. In the next post we shall look at common nouns.

Main Verbs (Simple Past Tense)

Objective: Write sentences in the simple past tense. When we began our lessons on main verbs I mentioned the difficulty resulting from subject and verb agreement. We have now put that behind us. Our new problem is in the nature of verbs in the past tense. Fortunately, as I have mentioned, the question of subject and verb agreement does not arise. But we have two kinds of verbs: regular and irregular verbs. The regular verbs add –ed to form their past tense and past participles. Once again we shall benefit from the list we had created. Regular verbs form their past tense and past participle by adding –ed to the main verb. From our list such verbs are 1) Play 2) Skip 3) Jump 4) Sip 5) Wash 6) Air 7) Watch 8) Kick 9) Cook 10) Fetch 11) Chew 12) Suck 13) Boil 14) Work 15) Milk 16) Brush 17) Paint 18) Laugh 19) Mill 20) Dance 21) Colour 22) Polish 23) Weld 24) Cry 25) Slash 26) Winnow 27) Slap 28) Smile 29) Call 30) Phone 31) Weed 32) Plant 33) Knock 34) Hammer 35) Cheer 36) Praise 37) Shell 38) Beg 39) Herd 40) Push 41) Close 42) Visit 43) Fish We can use any subject, singular or plural to form our sentences. a) John smiled. b) John and Joan smiled. c) He smiled. d) She smiled. e) They smiled. f) We smiled. g) It smiled. On the other hand, irregular verbs do not form their past tense and past participle in this way. In fact it is difficult to predict what these forms will be. The best advice is to learn them by heart. Examples from our list include: 1) Stand, stood, stood. 2) Sleep, slept, slept. 3) Sit, sat, sat. 4) Read, read, read. 5) Bath, bath, bath. 6) Run, ran, run. 7) Drink, drank, drunk. 8) Take, took, taken. 9) Think, thought, thought. 10) Hang, hung, hung. (hanged means to kill by hanging) 11) See, saw, seen. 12) Write, wrote, written. 13) Ride, rode, ridden. 14) Swing, swung, swung. 15) Draw, drew, drawn. You can see that our list has three items. For this lesson we need only the second item. The third item will be used in a future lesson but you need to know it. Again we do not have a subject and verb agreement problem. The problem here is to pick the right verb. In some cases the second and third item are similar. No problem. When they are not, be sure to use the second item. Thus: a) John ran. b) John and Joan wrote. c) He read. d) She saw. e) They rode. f) It drew. g) We thought. These verbs as I have mentioned present a special problem. You have to know them by heart. My list is very small. Any good dictionary has a huge list of these verbs. Make a habit of using this section of your dictionary every day to master the English sentence pattern of the day.

Main Verbs (II)

Objective: Write sentences following the pattern Plural nouns/We/They/You/I + verb without -s The first pattern we looked at is rather difficult. What we shall look at now is very simple. Again, we shall borrow from the list of verbs that we used in the previous lesson. If you were able to print it, that will be very helpful. i. Joan and John stand. ii. We sleep. iii. They sit. iv. You sit. v. I write. That is it. You now have a huge task of writing as many sentences as possible. That is the beauty of sentence patterns. I have given you a huge list of verbs; all you need to do is use the items of our pattern to write as many sentences as possible. Feel free to write your comments on your experience with this English sentence pattern. The comment box is open to everybody.

Main Verbs (spelling rules)

Objective: Spell correctly verbs that require –es (from the previous lesson). Now look back at the previous lesson. Most of the verbs simply required that you add –s. For example stand- stands, sleep – sleeps, write – writes. Well, that is okay. However, did you get the correct spelling for the following words: wash, watch, piss, fetch, brush, polish, cry, slash and fix. If you did, congratulations are in order. If you didn’t, this lesson is for you. a) For words ending in –sh, add –es e.g. wash – washes, polish – polishes, slash – slashes. i. Eugene washes. ii. Jane polishes. iii. John slashes. b) For words ending in – ch, add – es e.g. watch – watches, fetch – fetches. i. Jane watches. ii. Eugene fetches. c) For verbs ending in – s, add –es e.g. piss – pisses. The cow pisses. d) For verbs ending in –x, add –es e.g. fix – fixes. The mechanic fixes. e) For verbs ending in – y that comes after a consonant, drop the –y and add -ies. Note, the English alphabet has twenty-six letters. Five (5) of these are vowels: a, e, i, o and u. The remaining twenty –one(21) are consonants. Cry-cries, try- tries, dry-dries. i. Juliet cries. ii. She tries. iii. Joan tries. iv. She tries. v. The cloth dries. vi. It dries. Now one problem with rules is that no one likes them. You however do not have a choice if you want to spell correctly. You will need to write these sentences every day until you can spell them correctly without thing about the rules. Your journey to really enjoying this English sentence pattern has begun. Have fun writing your sentences.

Main Verbs

Objective: Make sentences using Noun/He/she/It + verb with -s I have taken an unusual approach to teaching grammar by starting with the helping verbs. I hope that you have understood many sentence patterns based on this approach. Another reason I chose this route is that the agreement required with main verbs is a little more demanding. Another problem learners of English as a foreign or second language run into is the lack of words to use. When we were dealing with the helping verbs we did not need a huge store of words. We used a few verbs but maintained our patterns. With the main verbs the idea then is to improve your vocabulary. I have two friends who are in class four and I rely on their experiences a lot to determine the level of difficulty for a beginner. One reason why ones mother tongue is called a first language is that you not only use it but it is also used in your environment. For this reason you not only acquire its structures effortlessly but you also acquire a huge vocabulary. So I got my two friends to give me a list of all the verbs that they know in their first language. I then gave them the English equivalent of those words. In just two days we had over sixty words to use that my learners understood. It is very frustrating both to the teacher and learner if the words being used are not in the learners’ vocabulary. Below are the words that we got: 1) stand 2) sleep 3) sit 4) read 5) play 6) eat 7) bath 8) run 9) drink 10) skip 11) jump 12) sip 13) take 14) think 15) wash 16) hang 17) air 18) see 19) write 20) watch 21) piss 22) kick 23) cook 24) fetch 25) chew 26) suck 27) boil 28) ride 29) work 30) milk 31) swing 32) brush 33) paint 34) laugh 35) mill 36) dance 37) colour 38) draw 39) polish 40) sell 41) weld 42) cry 43) slash 44) winnow 45) slap 46) smile 47) call 48) phone 49) weed 50) plant 51) shave 52) build 53) knock 54) hammer 55) cheer 56) praise 57) shell 58) beg 59) herd 60) push 61) open 62) close 63) visit 64) fish Let us now use the words we have to write sentences using the pattern of the day 1) Eugene stands. 2) He stands. 3) Grace stands. 4) She stands. 5) The cow stands. 6) It stands. Now repeat this pattern with all the verbs on the list I have given you. You can extend the list of verbs and if you do not mind share the new verbs with me. Have a good time using this English sentence pattern.