Conventions of Standard English Flashcards

Medium

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Terms in this set

Parts of Speech The eight word categories: nouns (people, places, things, ideas), pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections.
Subject-Verb Agreement A verb must match its subject in number: singular subjects take singular verbs, plural subjects take plural verbs — regardless of words that come between them.
Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement A pronoun must agree with its antecedent — the noun it replaces — in number and gender, and the antecedent must be unambiguous.
Punctuation The marks that structure sentences: commas separate elements, semicolons join related independent clauses, colons introduce lists or explanations after a complete sentence, and quotation marks enclose exact speech.
Apostrophes & Possessives Apostrophes show possession (the nurse's chart; the nurses' station) or mark contractions (it's = it is); they never form ordinary plurals.
Capitalization Capitalize sentence openers, the pronoun I, and proper nouns — specific names of people, places, organizations, languages, days, months, and titles used with a name.
Spelling Rules The patterns behind English spelling: i before e except after c (with exceptions), dropping a silent e before vowel suffixes (hope/hoping), changing y to i (carry/carried), and doubling final consonants in stressed syllables (occur/occurred).
Sentence Structure & Clauses An independent clause can stand alone; a dependent clause cannot. Sentences are simple (one independent), compound (two independent), complex (independent + dependent), or compound-complex (both).
Fragments, Run-ons & Comma Splices A fragment is an incomplete sentence missing a subject, a verb, or a complete thought; a run-on fuses two independent clauses with no punctuation; a comma splice joins them with only a comma.