The A-Team of Writing: The 8 Components you Need for Basic Sentence Structure

    Whether you call it the A-Team, Varsity, or the Championship League there is always a group of people that are the ones called in when a job absolutely needs to be done right the first time around. In writing, the A-Team isn't made up of a crazy pilot, a big man with a fear of airplanes, or an absolute planning genius. It's comprised of elements that are necessary for the construction of good sentences. There has been some debate about whether there are 6, 8, or 9 members of this team, but when I was studying linguistics and English literature I was taught there were 8.

    Speech, whether written or spoken, is comprised of 8 elements; Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. In order to have a rich story with vivid imagery, all components must be accounted for. If you only had interjections it would feel like you were perpetually yelling at your reader. If you don't use pronouns it's hard to tell characters apart. Adjectives and adverbs are needed to describe what's going on in a scene - they're basically the paint on a canvas.

    At this point you might be groaning, remembering all the language lessons you had as a kid. Don't worry, I won't make you watch School House Rock or diagram a sentence, but I do think there are a lot of authors out there that could benefit from a basic review of sentence structure. You kind of stop thinking about how sentences are constructed after high school unless you go on to study humanities and end up with an English, linguistics, or Etymology degree. 

    Random fact, did you know it takes seven years to be considered fluent in Spanish but twenty to be fluent in English? And, most native English speakers, still don't use our language correctly? The best editor I've ever had was someone whose first language wasn't English. Why? Because they care about sentence structure more and are sticklers for using our language correctly. Those of us who are native speakers are lazy. Seriously, we are. How many times have you ended a sentence with "but" or "it"? That's not proper. Also, think of how many times you've used "who" instead of "whom". We get lazy because we know our context clues will be enough for a native speaker to pick up on, but they can be confusing to non-natives and readers. Therefore, when writing you should always adhere to the 8 parts of speech and use proper language...with the exception of dialogue, but that's something we'll talk about another time.

  

Nouns are the first part of speech and without them, you don't have subjects. Honestly, they are legitly your subject. Your main character is a noun, their dog is a noun, their house is a noun, and that broken chair that's propped up with a book on their back porch is a noun. 

Nouns are people, places, and things.  For example, in the sentence, "Mary threw the pink ball hard and it broke the glass vase," Mary, ball, and vase are nouns. Mary is a person. Ball and vase are objects. Had we rewritten the sentence to say, "Mary threw the pink ball hard and it broke the glass vase across the street," street would also be a noun. 

The second part of speech is a verb. Verbs are action words. Verbs state what someone or something is doing. Such as in our example sentence: Mary threw the pink ball hard and it broke the glass vase.

In that last sentence, our verbs are "threw" and "broke" because these are actions.  Anytime you write words like "Walk", "ran", "looked", "saw", "jumped" and "laughed" you are using verbs. 

Along with verbs and nouns are adverbs and adjectives. These are words that describe nouns and verbs. Such as "pink", "hard", and "glass in our example sentence. If you're describing something, you're using one of these two elements. Describing a person, place, or thing? You're using an adjective. Describing an action? You're using an adverb.

Now, the next part of speech is a nifty little thing that can get you into lots of trouble if you aren't careful. You know how everyone is always saying things like, "My pronouns are she/her"? Yeah, pronouns...they're so small but so important and some people have a hard time wrapping their minds around them. Like in most elements of language, there are two forms of pronouns - singular and plural, but there is also this 'new' third option where plurals become singulars.

Pronouns exist to indicate gender and identify a person. "He," "she", "it", "they", "them", "her", "their", and "his" are all pronouns. These words are so tiny and yet explaining them is difficult. Here's the thing, gender isn't just something that we apply to living creatures. Languages use it for words. Spanish is probably the most accurate example of this where words that end in "a" are feminine and words that end in "o" are masculine, but if you're talking about a group of people comprised of both genders then you revert back to the masculine form of the word. That was until "x" was created. "x" started being added to words in the Spanish language to indicate a group of people, regardless of gender. For instance, a group of males might be called, "latinos", a group of females would be "latinas", and a group of both would be "latinx". English kind of adopted this...kind of. 

    Before feminism, humankind was referred to as mankind. Okay? even in English, we reverted back to the masculine pronouns when there were groups of people. That was until the rise of feminism and the alphabet mafia. The LGBTQ+ community had a massive impact on how we use pronouns in the English language. In speech this isn't really a problem because if someone who looks like a girl comes up to you and says, "My pronouns are he/they", then all you have to do is change how you talk about them. 

    For example, if you grew up with a girl named Suzie and you said, "I heard she was heading to state volleyball" but then she changed her pronouns you would just say, "I heard they were heading to state volleyball", this is an easy change to follow in an oral conversation where you are talking one-on-one with a person about a single individual. It gets a little more complicated in the writing world.

    I purposely sought out a book with a nonbinary character as a way to study this change in the dynamics of pronouns when applied to writing. The book I settled on reading had a trans main character. It was titled, Heart, Haunt, Havoc (The Gideon Testaments). I was iffy going into this book on how I should read it when one of the main character's pronouns was plural. Colin used "he/they" pronouns while Bishop used "they/them". I bought the book on Kindle (knowing I could use my accessibility feature to listen to the book if needed), and started reading. I did hit a brief hiccup where I couldn't decipher whether a pronoun was plural or singular because both characters were in the scene and they both would used the "they" pronoun in a singular manner. So, I listened to the book instead and didn't hit another hitch. 

    What it comes down to is the only rule that exists for pronouns in literature anymore is to use them. Seriously. Your character could say their pronouns are whatever they want, as long as you use those pronouns appropriately your reader should be able to decipher them.

Now we get to the 'complicated' parts of speech. Buckle up, buttercup, it's time to discuss the part of sentence diagraming that every high school freshman hates. I'll make this as quick and painless as possible. 

Prepositions: Words that join one word to another while showing direction, location, or time. These are words like, "by", "to", "at", and "then". 

Example: Dad walked by the vase, looking at the windows while Mom directed her gaze to Mary. Our prepositions are "by", "at", and "to", because "by" shows the location, and "at" and "to" show direction.

Conjunctions: Words meant to connect a sentence together. These words are the glue of the entire sentence structure. Take for instance the sentence, "Mom looked mad, yet Mary wasn't sorry and her parents knew it. They looked at each other but neither knew what to do." Our conjunctions are "yet", "and" and "but".

I won't be mean and make you watch School House Rock, buuuuuuttttttt...."Conjunction junction, what's your function!" 

If you don't get that reference then you're either too young or I'm too old. 

Lastly, the eighth part of speech is interjections. These are abrupt remarks and if you use too many of them your reader will hate you. No one wants to be yelled at. Using too many interjections is like leaving the caps lock on during an email. Don't do it. 

See the graphic for an example of these. Exclamation marks and interjections go hand in hand and, let me tell you, there is nothing that bugs me more than having too many exclamation remarks. 

I get that you love them! I really do! But, to me, this feels like you're yelling! I want to blow my brains out! Please, stop! Like, for real! 

    There are other grammatical marks, use them. Periods, commas, apostrophes (or floating commas as half the newspaper office I work in calls them), colons, semicolons, hyphens, dashes, em dashes...take your pick. Exclamation marks should be used like salt, a little at a time because they make a huge impact. 

    If you'd like to practice using these 8 elements and have a little fun, I recommend Mad Libs. You could also do sentence diagramming but I haven't met a single person, that I know of, who genuinely enjoys diagramming. I swear, it's like the bane of every writer's existence. Worst week of our high school careers.