Learning to identify different types of phrases will help you place them correctly in the flow of the sentence, avoid ambiguous meanings, and write parallel sentences and bulleted lists so that skimming readers can grasp your ideas quickly.

 

Verb phrases carry half the meaning of your sentences. You'll learn to identify the primary verb and all the words that "help" it along. Identifying the true verb and its helpers in a sentence is a must in reflecting time accurately, maintaining a consistent viewpoint, and expressing "who does what" and "what happened" in a passage.

 

Most sentences have at least one prepositional phrase, and many sentences have four or more such phrases. Learning to identify prepositional phrases will help you avoid the common error of mistaking an "object of a preposition" for the subject of a sentence. That mistake, in itself, leads to wrong verb choices and ambiguous meanings.

 

Verbal phrases fall into three categories: participial phrases, infinitive phrases, and gerund phrases. Learning to identify each type will reduce the chance that you'll mistake a verbal phrase with the primary verb of the sentence. Again, the inability to distinguish between the primary verb of a sentence and a verbal phrase leads to subject-verb agreement errors and ambiguous meanings.

 

You'll learn to place modifiers (or descriptors) as close to the words they describe as possible. You'll learn to identify misplaced and dangling modifiers that create convoluted sentences, ambiguous interpretations, or nonsensical statements.

 

Parallelism means simply that similar items should be structured in a like manner in bulleted lists and sentences. In other words, the items must "match" like a set or collection. In these exercises, you'll identify and correct unparallel items. As a result, your writing will be clear and crisp so that skimming readers grasp the information quickly.