English phrases

Banished words are words or phrases that can be misinterpreted, misused, overused, or otherwise deemed useless. Every year Lake Superior States University releases a list of banished words. These words come from a variety of sources across the entire country. These banished word nominations are sent in and a committee makes their decision of which words make the cut before the end of each year. Inspired by words on the Banished Word List, our team was tasked to come up with 10 words which we feel should be banished as well. We’ve also surveyed 50 people about their most annoying words and/or expressions. We will explore these results in further detail within this essay. The first word we felt should be nominated to the banished list is “lit”. This term is widely used in text messages and social media. It means amazing or awesome, usually used to describe something…

1. Introduction This paper presents a sentence to analyze how constituents function and the four test that can be used to prove the constituent. Linguist consider a constituent to be a structural unit made of a word or words that create the sentence and other phrases as well. In (1) the sentence that is analyzed and the constituents that are going to be tested are presented. Branches are used to show the boundaries that form the constituents. 1. Sentence and Constituents a. He might have been…

After finishing my first semester of English, I can say that I have improved immensely as a writer. Coming into the class, I was not very confident in my abilities as a writer. I did not think my word choice was above average, I thought my sentence structure was something that could be qualified as trash, and I felt like I could not address my audience in any way. However, after this first semester, I feel that everything has changed. Through evaluating my own work this semester, I have been…

Preview: In the 1990s Galveston College had an outstanding English instructor named Michael Hodge. Michael was one of the most anti-authoritarian and impertinent persons I have ever met. Sometimes he liked to dispute with people just to for the sake of holding them accountable for their thinking and ideas, which is to say he would dispute people’s beliefs even when he might have completely agreed with everything that person was saying. Then at age 48 he went to bed one night and had his…

When the adjective switches to a complicated adjective phrase, the adjunction rule established from the previous case no longer justifies sentence C and D. In this case, given that capable of winning and candidate do not select each other, when we combine them in the order shown in sentence C, the sentence becomes ungrammatical. However, when we switch the order of combination of the adjective phrase and the noun, as shown in sentence D, the sentence is now considered grammatical. If the…

When it comes to finding the right words to say, I have trouble: being either too complicated or too simple. There are many grammar checkers on the web, and some of them want a person to have a certain percentage of vocabulary words. Others tell you that an expression is too complex, (usually the same words!) I try to keep a balance between both and only pull out a thesaurus when I notice I am repeating a phrase too much. Though the phrase ‘an expert’ does appear rather frequently in the “What…

The tone of these lines is interestingly ambiguous. On one hand, the tone is gentle and encouraging; on the other hand, the tone is assertive and challenging, as if the mother means to say, “if I have worked hard, you have no excuse for not working hard yourself.” Both tones are present, creating a mingled attitude of concern, encouragement, and challenge. Similar ambiguity and complexity are present in the phrase “kinder hard” (16), where the first word can initially seem consoling and positive…

the semester my writing was not as academically as it should had been, based on the educational level that college writing requires. My grammar was mostly what affected my development as a writer. Most of my grammar grades in the beginning were about from twenty or thirty point out of fifty. My hopes for passing this class weren’t as strong as they were further in the semester. Obviously I was very insecure as college student, whose native language isn’t English, to progress in this English 101A…

Morph syntactic Analysis: 12th Grade Male from Mexico #2 Introduction This Morph Syntactic Analysis project allowed me to explore the word formation of an ESL student. The student I examined was a twentieth grade male from Mexico. The Spanish aspects of his prior knowledge may have affected his English composition. The analysis features morphology and syntax areas of language. Noun phrases, corpus, verb phrases, verb tense, sentence composition, orthography, and other parts of speech…

George Orwell had a very unique writing style. His passage “Politics and the English Language” in his book “Why I Write” explain how to “avoid ugliness” in ones’ writing. Orwell writes about four ways to identify these pre-constructed passages or phrases. The four ways are Dying Metaphors, Operators or verbal false limbs, Pretentious diction, and Meaningless words. Dying Metaphors are prefabricated metaphors that have been used many times in many different contexts. It can also be metaphors that…