Nouns and Pronouns
Every sentence you will ever read or write is built around two jobs: naming things and standing in for things already named. Nouns do the naming. Pronouns do the standing in. Get comfortable with these two parts of speech and the rest of grammar – agreement, case, clear reference – suddenly makes sense, because almost […]
Suffixes and Word Families: How Endings Change Meaning
Prefixes change what a word means. Suffixes usually change what a word does. That is the distinction most people miss, and it costs them on any question where several choices come from the same family. Preserve, preservation, and preservative all share one idea about keeping things safe. Only one of them can occupy a given […]
