I don’t even know where to begin with Purdue’s Online Writing Lab site. It’s such a plethora of information on everything writing related that it’s hard to tell where to start with the site. One look at the site map, and you know that you could spend weeks worth of spare time just learning everything you can about writing. My mind just gets blown away even trying to decide what I want to learn about at any particular time on the site. Recently though, I’ve been learning about (and struggling with) grammar, so I’ll take a look around there.
The first thing that caught my eye is Adjectives and Adverbs. As it turns out, adjectives describe a noun, and they usually answer questions like “which?,” “what kind of?,” or “how many?” Adverbs on the other hand, usually tell us the “how” of things, though they can give us “when,” “where” and “why” as well. This article put it in pretty plain terms and made the concept easy to understand.
When I saw the title “Appositives,” I though “what are those?,” so I decided to find out. From what I read, an appositive is a freaky combination of noun and adjective traits. It’s a noun that modifies or describes another noun. Now that’s just crazy!
I hear all sorts of stuff about writing in an active voice, so I read “Active Verb Tenses” to find out more about this topic. I didn’t even know there were that many different ways to use verbs, let alone simply active ways! This page is a useful little table of various tenses that are active. It’s a very simple layout and makes things pretty simple.
These are just three of the many amazing pages on the Online Writing Lab. I didn’t even leave the section on grammar for these. There’s information on writing for various purposes and the things to remember when doing that. This will be a frequented site when I have questions about anything with the English language.