I want you to imagine you are living way back in time — back before you could buy a cake mix at the store. Back when you had to know how much flour to add, how many eggs, and and how much vanilla was too much (Wait! Is that even possible?) Ok... have you got that recipe?
Now imagine that you put the ingredients in. You put in some white powdery stuff and some dark stuff and you aren’t paying attention to measurements, but you do end up with something that looks like a cake. Because you didn’t think about what the stuff was (remember, you only guessed), your cake is TERRIBLE.
Now you’ve got to start over and try to figure out what you’ve done. So you read the labels and you pay attention to the measurements. Now you know to add flour, baking powder, and cocoa before you ever think about adding eggs or milk. You need to be able to identify the ingredients before you can follow a proper order. And once you’ve learned these things — ingredients and proper order — you made a pretty awesome cake!
These same rules apply to knowing parts of speech. Once you understand the ingredients (and their purpose) then it isn’t too difficult to figure out what order they go in. The good news is that even if you don’t know every recipe, you can at least memorize the names of the ingredients.
What do I mean?
Right now, don’t worry about gerunds or antecedents or participles — those are all special recipes for more advanced “cooking” lessons.
Let’s just focus on the basic ingredients — those eight parts of speech.
Answer the questions...
Every part of speech answers specific questions. If you can remember this, you will know EITHER what word answers your question OR which word you want to use to answer the question for someone else.
**Nouns** answer the question *who? Or What?* If you can think of our baking supplies, **NOUNS** help you decide WHO will do the baking and WHAT he or she will bake.
**VERBS** answer the question *What are they doing?* OR (in the case of verbs of being) *What Are they?*
**Adjectives** answer questions like Which One? How Much? What Kind? Adjectives satisfy our desire to give more detail.
**Adverb**s answer *time* and *degree* questions — questions such as *To What extent?* Or *How*? Or *When*?
So stock your pantry. Find your favorite poem or your favorite story and out of that, break open your favorite sentence(s) and decide which jar they came from based on what questions they answer.
There’s more...
These are the best, most used, most basic parts... know them first. Once you’ve mastered these four, once you’ve identified these spices, then we will go on to four more that REALLY add the flavor.
You’ve been playing with these words your whole life. Maybe you’ve never realized their power. But now that you’ve labeled these spices, you’re ready to do some serious cooking!
Once you know what to do with these basic ingredients, you’ll be ready to use some spices that will make things even more exciting.