GrammarPhile Blog

Understanding Clauses, the Building Blocks of a Sentence

Posted by Phil Jamieson   Aug 24, 2017 7:30:00 AM

It’s highly unlikely your boss or coworker will ever ask you to identify the subject or verb in a sentence you wrote in an email. And colleagues will never ask you to verify that all pronouns in a sentence you wrote are agreeing with their proper antecedents. Well, at least not in most professions. This isn’t surprising, but makes it easy to see why we forget about what clauses are and why their structures are important in our daily writing.

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Topics: nonrestrictive clauses, clauses, restrictive clauses, main clauses, conditional clauses, relative clauses, noun clauses

We Want YOU ... to Understand Restrictive/Nonrestrictive Clauses

Posted by Terri Porter   Jul 2, 2015 6:30:00 AM

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In the spirit of Independence Day, freedom and such, this first sentence of the Declaration of Independence provides a springboard for a timely discussion of restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses.

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Topics: nonrestrictive clauses, that vs. which, essential clauses, clauses, restrictive clauses

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