Tech Biz Writing

The putting together of texts from the individual atoms of writing involves another bete noire of the written universe: grammar. To say that grammar is easy is a very smug statement, especially as it’s scarcely taught in modern schools. Whole English departments are grammar-free zones. Yet you can hardly call yourself a writer if you know nothing of it, or imagine it’s a word describing your grandmother.

We’re going to tackle grammar here in its basic form, beginning with the atoms that compose it, and moving on to how these elements are put together for building texts. For that is what writing is: creating texts from smaller elements, while retaining coherence, cohesion, structure, and, ultimately, meaning.

The Levels of Grammar

Grammar operates at five levels of increasing complexity:

* Words
* Morphemes.
* Phrases
* Clauses
* Sentences

These all work together at any one point, so although we can define them singly, we must bear them all in mind when creating, or parsing sentences.

To make the point clearer, we shall examine all these levels in the context of a single sentence: The children played Scrabble while their father sent an email.

The sentence breaks naturally into parts, each virtually a complete sentence in itself:

* The children played Scrabble
* Their father sent an email.

The five levels of grammar are represented thus:

* Word: Children.
* Morpheme: Child - ren.
* Phrase: The children.
* Clause: The children played Scrabble.
* Sentence: The children played Scrabble while their father sent an email.

Words
Words are the building blocks of a text; they both bear the meaning and hold the sentences together. Thus there are two types of word.

* That carry meaning.
* That bind a sentence together.

The words that carry the meaning in the example sentence are:

children played Scrabble father sent email

Each has a specific meaning which can be defined in a dictionary.

The words which bind the sentence together are:

The while their an

These words don’t bear a specific meaning, but the dictionary tells us how they are to be used, e.g. “indicating a contrast”.

Apart from these two types, there are also classes of word. The meaning or content words are classed into:

* Nouns
e.g. Scrabble
* Verbs
e.g. played
* Adjectives
e.g. yellow
* Adverbs
e.g. quickly

Binding or structure words are classed into:

* Pronouns
e.g. she
* Conjunctions
e.g. while
* Prepositions
e.g. beside
* Determiners
e.g. an

Next : 63. Creating texts - Part 2