image: Nouns and verbs are learned in different parts of the brain. view more Credit: Mestres-Misse et al. Two Spanish psychologists and a German neurologist have recently shown that the brain ...

Writers and language geeks inherit a ranking system of sorts: verbs good, adjectives bad, nouns sadly unavoidable. Verbs are action, verve! “I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might ...

And since verbs are supposed to agree in number with their subjects — one cat is, two cats are — the roughly 200 collective nouns in our language cause a lot of confusion. Compare: The family ...

I found five effective ways to teach the link between imagination and grammar. 1. Set up the imaginative tripod. Most of the stories students brought to me lacked a clear sense of perspective.

We were all taught in elementary school that adverbs modify verbs and adjectives modify nouns: Happy adults sing happily. That’s true, but there’s more to the story.