If you’ve read any of my posts before, you know how important analysis is in your essays and it’s vital to know about word types! If essay writing is something you struggle with, make sure you read my free eBook: Essay Templates!
Analysis is essentially picking out individual features from the quotes in your essays. This could be words, phrases, devices, sentence types or punctuation. This is important because it allows you to explain how the writer is creating the meaning not just what the meaning is. Why has the writer chosen to use that word rather than a different one? For more information on how to structure your essay, check out my essay writing guide here!
Of course, when we’re talking about individual words in the quote we can just say ‘the word’. But…it’s much more impressive if you can actually name the word!
So…I’m going to assume you understand nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. If you don’t, check out my beginner blog post which explains all of these.
In this blog post we are going to level up and look at complex and sophisticated word types. We’re going to look how you can use your analysis to access the top grades!
1. Present Participles
Erm…what?
Okay…so as always, grammar sounds far more confusing than it actually is and this is a perfect example of that!
Present participles are just verbs ending in ‘-ing’!
That’s it!
So why do you need to know about this?
Present participles are great because no matter what tense you put them in, they still sound like they’re happening right now!
Past: It was raining.
Present: It is raining.
Future: It will be raining.
This creates a sense of immediacy and action which can create tension and excitement in the text. Imagine if a poem consisted of ONLY present participles…that would be a pretty intense poem!
2. Possessive Pronouns
So…in the last blog post we looked at pronouns. If you can’t remember that they are, have a recap here.
Possessive pronouns are a type of pronoun which show ownership (possession): mine, hers, his, ours, yours, theirs.
These are great because in texts they often show that people see other objects (or even other people) as belonging to them.
For example, in the poem ‘My Last Duchess’ by Robert Browning (in the AQA Power and Conflict poetry anthology), the possessive pronoun ‘my’ in the title helps us to see that the Duke saw his former wife as a possession and an extension of his personality.
3. Articles
Finally…last but not least…we have articles.
These go before nouns to show whether they are specific or general and we have two types.
Definite articles: There is only one definite article: ‘the’. This is used to show that we are referring to one specific noun. If we said ‘the shop’, we’re not talking about any old shop, we’re talking about one specific shop…THE shop!
Indefinite articles: There are two indefinite articles: ‘a’ and ‘an’ (‘a’ is used before nouns beginning with a consonant and ‘an’ is used before nouns beginning with a vowel). These ones are used to show that we could be talking about a range of things. This time, if we said ‘a shop’, we could be talking any shop!
Examples
Let’s have a look at some examples:
If you said ‘pass me a pen’, you just want a random pen, you’re not fussy, any pen will do! However, if you said, ‘pass me the pen’ you are referring to one specific pen!
Why Does Any of this Matter?
Well…whether the writer uses definite or indefinite articles can show how much importance they attributes to the noun and can symbolise deeper meanings.
For example, in the poem ‘Poppies’ by Jane Weir (in the AQA Power and Conflict poetry anthology), the author writes:
‘A dove flew from the pear tree’.
In this quote we have two article – one definite and one indefinite. The poem is about a parent losing a child in war. Arguably, the dove could be a symbol for the child. An indefinite article could have been used to show that the child is one in many, many thousands of soldiers who will lose their lives. Simply ‘a dove’. It is interesting that doves also represent peace.
However, the writer has used a definite article to describe ‘the pear tree’. A pear tree provides fruit and nourishment. Perhaps the writer has used a definite article to show that the pear tree is a symbol for the earth (a source of nourishment) from which the child (the dove) has just departed, finding peace at last.
And…there we have it! I hope you enjoyed that and you’re starting to see that word types can REALLY help you in your exams and analysing sophisticated word types can be a gateway to achieving top grades!