Craft Back to Basics: Basic Parts of Speech and How to Use Them with Terri Main

How long has it been since your high school English class? Five years? Ten? Twenty? It depresses you to think about? However long it has been, you have probably forgotten much of what you learned (at least learned well enough to pass the course.)

This is no disgrace. The same could be said of most of your other classes as well. Contrary to popular belief everything you see or hear is not recorded permanently in some mental archive of your mind. The brain periodically discards information that is not used. And most of us do not end up discussing passive and active voice at a dinner party. And if we do, we probably won't be invited to more dinner parties.

That would be like a carpenter spending all night talking about the comparative value of drop forged versus cast iron tools. Indeed, the carpenter may not have been interested in such nuances of tool manufacturing until s/he took up carpentry as a career.

Likewise, those of us who have decided to pursue writing as a profession or a serious avocation find ourselves needing to gain some proficiency with the tools of the trade. Those include the parts of speech. This course will act as a refresher course on parts of speech. It will help you recognize each part of speech, understand how a word may begin as one part of speech and end up being used as a different part of speech, the power values of different parts of speech, and correcting some common errors.