The structure of the language is known as its grammar. A good grasp of grammar enables people to speak and write clearly and concisely, and to understand all kinds of reading material.
Words are the building blocks of language. Grammar is a set of rules that determines how these building blocks can be put together in different combinations to create well-formed sentences, phrases and clauses.
Without the rules of grammar, words would be placed in a random order, and no one would be able to understand what anyone else was saying.
Parts of Speech
Words are grouped together according to the functions they perform in a sense. There are ten parts of speech in English. Nouns (or pronouns) and verbs are essential to structure of a sentence, but it’s the other parts of the speech, including adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions, that make a sentence meaningful and interesting.
For example, “Farhan arrived.”
| Farhan | Noun |
| Arrived | Verb |
This sentence contains all the essential parts of speech, but it’s not very informative.
Another example, “My friend Farhan arrived early, so we went straight to the local market.”
| My | determiner |
| friend | noun |
| Farhan | noun |
| arrived | verb |
| early | adverb |
| so | conjunction |
| we | pronoun |
| went | verb |
| straight | adverb |
| to | preposition |
| the | determiner |
| local | adjective |
| market | noun |
Non-essential parts of speech can be added to a sentence to make it more descriptive
Structuring Sentences
A sentence must also be correctly punctuated for it to make sense. Grammar explains which order to put words in, while punctuation marks such as commas and full stops indicate how the sentence should be read.
