10 Grammar Rules Every Teacher Should Know

Rule #1 Know the Parts of Speech
Picture a car. It moves on a road. The car is red, and it moves quickly. In this image you’ve got all the parts of speech:

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  The car is your noun—it is the thing that you are discussing.
  
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  It moves—that’s the verb, the action the noun takes.
  
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  The car is red—red is an adjective describing the noun.
  
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  The red car moves quickly—this is an adverb modifying the verb.
  
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  The red car moves quickly on the road—“on the road” is a prepositional phrase, consisting of a preposition (on) and its object (the road). A prepositional phrase locates the noun and verb.
  

Add conjunctions (connecting words like “and” and “but”) and articles (a, an, the) and you’ve got all the building blocks of language. Try your own visualization. Do you see how the parts work together to complete the image? Now when you need to specify a word in a sentence, you can define its function by knowing its part of speech. You’ve won half the battle!