Irregular Verbs

The simple answer is: Any verb that doesn't follow standard rules of conjugation. Unfortunately, there are so many "irregular" verbs in the English language that the title doesn't really make sense. These grammar anomalies have been lurking in plain sight for years, and they might just come naturally to you, but we're still going to take a closer look.

Irregular Verbs and the Past Tense

Typically, it's correct (and easy enough) to say the past tense of a verb ends in an "-ed." For example, “I drop the kids off in the morning” in the present tense becomes, “I dropped the kids off this morning.” Or, “I scrub the dishes,” in the present changes to “I scrubbed the dishes” in the past tense. Those two letters added to the end of a word are a pretty good indicator of past tense.

Then you come across a verb like "speak." In the present tense, you’d say, “I speak.” In the past tense, you would not say, “I speaked.” Instead, you’d say, “I spoke.”

Boom. You’ve just found an irregular verb. As you might have guessed, irregular verbs break the standard rule of ending in "-ed" in the past tense.

To further confuse the issue, irregular verbs have no discernible pattern themselves. They're just ... irregular. These irregular verbs are some of the most commonly used in English — "go," "say," "see," "think," "make," "take," "come," and "know." These workhorse verbs take on different spellings in the past tense.

In general, irregular verbs are easy enough to spot in the past tense — if it doesn’t end in "-ed," it’s irregular.

Spotting More Irregular Verbs

Test yourself: Which of these examples of irregular verbs are correct?

1. She drunk the glass of water.
2. The phone rung and rung.
3. The pants shrunk in the dryer.

Answer: Only number three is correct. In one, the correct past tense is "drank," and in number two, the phone "rang."

It’s still quite easy to get confused by irregular verbs, especially when you look at the difference between simple past tense and past participles.

For example, “Stacy drived to the public pool where she swum for hours.” Hopefully this sounds wrong to your ears, because it’s just an irregular mess.

There are two irregular verbs in this example, but neither is correct. The first is obvious – "drived" attempts to follow the regular verb "-ed" ending. It sounds awkward, because it’s not a real word at all. The correct (irregular) past tense is "drove."

The second one is a little trickier. "Swum" is in fact the past participle of the verb "to swim," but it's not the simple past, which is "swam."

The correct version of Stacy's day at the pool is, “Stacy drove to the public pool where she swam for hours.”

As confusing as irregular verbs may seem, they start to come naturally with practice. What irregular verbs do you still stumble over?

 

The Rule of Adjective Order

The rule of adjective order refers to the order in which adjectives are placed in a sentence. In other words, if you have more than one adjective describing a noun, this rule determines which adjective you should put first, second, third, etc.

As a note, some grammarians include “determiner” at the beginning of this list, but we’re excluding it because determiners are not really adjectives. Determiners are the articles or other limiters that start off the adjective list — things like a, an, the, our, my, etc.

1. Quantity or number — four, five, many, few

Quantity or number is as simple as it sounds. If there's an amount, it goes first. This is usually the easiest to identify.

2. Opinion — pretty, lovely, gross, boring, amazing, hard

Opinions are also called observations. They are adjectives that someone might consider biased. You may look at a painting and find it beautiful, but someone else might consider it ugly. A task that you find to be easy might be difficult for another.

3. Size — huge, small, mammoth, 5 feet tall, 36 inches wide

Size can be a judgment call, or it can also be a concrete, measurable descriptor. Whether or not it involves a number, size is tertiary in adjective order.

4. Shape — triangular, oblong, circular, straight

A shape adjective describes the physical configuration of something. It may refer to an actual shape or the general description of an object.

5. Age — five-year, 12-minute, young, antique, mature, modern, old

An age adjective tells you how old or young something or someone is. It can be a specific number or a general descriptor.

6. Color — purple, marigold, black, pale, sparkly

This one’s pretty obvious as well. It can be one of your standard ROYGBIV colors, or it can be a description of the quality of the color, such as "bright" or "translucent."

7. Origin — French, Italian, Martian, suburban

An origin adjective describes the source of something. Where did the noun come from? Generally this shows up as a proper noun, but it could be something like "rural" or "urban."

8. Material — gold, wooden, polyester, silk, plastic

Material refers to what the noun is physically made of. This can get a bit confusing if you're using a word like "gold," which could be a color or a material, or both.

9. Purpose — cooking, cleaning, hammering, sleeping

This is the last adjective in the order and is often considered part of the noun. It usually references what the item is used for and often ends in “-ing.” Think about a "roasting pan" or a "sleeping bag" or a "curling iron." This final adjective could also be a noun in an adjective form, such as a "coffee mug" or a "flower vase."

 

10 Varieties of Linguistic Siamese Twins

 

One of the most intriguing aspects of idiomatic phrases is their fixed nature, an aspect acknowledged in two terms for the class of idioms distinguished by the use of the conjunction and or the conjunction or between the constituent words: irreversible binomials and freezes. (They are also referred to as binomials or binomial pairs, or are identified by the colloquial expression “Siamese twins.”)

Ten sometimes overlapping variations of linguistic Siamese twins (which, because they are often clichés, should be used with caution) follow, including a category for triplets:

1. Binomials connected with and include “alive and well,” “nuts and bolts,” and “skin and bone.”

2. Binomials connected with or include “give or take,” “more or less,” and “win or lose.”

3. Binomials connected with other words include “dawn till dusk,” “front to back,” “head over heels.”

4. Binomials that contain opposites or antonyms include “days and nights,” “high or low,” and “up and down.”

5. Binomials that contain related words or synonyms include “house and home,” “leaps and bounds,” and “prim and proper.”

6. Binomials that contain alliteration include “friend or foe,” “rant and rave,” and “tried and true.”

7. Binomials that contain numbers include “four or five” -- note that the linguistic convention is to always state the lower number first (a figurative idiom is this category is “at sixes and sevens,” meaning “in a confused state”)

8. Binomials that contain similar-sounding words: “doom and gloom,” “out and about,” and “wear and tear.” This category includes rhyming slang, in which a word or phrase is slang code for a word that rhymes with the second binomial term in the phrase (even though only the first binomial term may constitute the slang) and is either random, as in minces, from “mince pies,” for eyes, or suggestive, as in trouble, from “trouble and strife,” for wife.

9. Binomials that contain exact or near repetition include “dog eat dog,” “kill or be killed,” or “neck and neck.”

10. Trinomials, which contain three terms, include “blood, sweat, and tears,” “left, right, and center,” and “win, lose, and draw.”

Take care, when using these clichés, to reproduce them correctly (unless you are deliberately -- and obviously -- distorting them for emphatic or humorous effect, as when referring to fashionably ripped jeans as “tear and wear”) so that erroneous usage does not have a negative impact on your overall message.

From: Daily Writing Tips

Three Cases of Complicated Parenthetical Punctuation

Inserting additional information into a sentence without careful consideration of sentence organization can create barriers to comprehension, especially when the parenthesis is complicated. Here are several sentences in which complex parenthetical phrases are not treated with care, followed by discussion and revision.
1. Consumers have the right to speak out or complain, and to seek compensation—payment or a replacement item—or redress—have a wrong corrected.
Here, the use of dashes to set off a pair of parenthetical phrases confuses the reader’s eye; use mirror-image parenthetical marks instead for a clearer picture of the sentence’s syntactical organization: “Consumers have the right to speak out or complain, and to seek compensation (payment or a replacement item) or redress (have a wrong corrected).”
2. They had an unwavering belief that they simply could not—or maybe more accurately stated, would not—be defeated.
Because “maybe more accurately stated” is a parenthesis within a parenthesis, a comma must precede as well as follow it: “They had an unwavering belief that they simply could not—or, maybe more accurately stated, would not—be defeated.”
3. If thorough controls are not in place, over time, as updates and changes are made to your environment, conflicts are likely to arise, posing varying levels of risk to your business and ultimately forcing you to revisit your design.
The number of commas in this sentence is excessive; when the phrase “over time” and the rest of the parenthetical phrase (ending with environment) is transposed, the comma between them becomes extraneous and the sentence structure is clearer: “If thorough controls are not in place, as updates and changes are made to your environment over time, conflicts are likely to arise, posing varying levels of risk to your business and ultimately forcing you to revisit your design.”

From: Daily Writing Tips

If You Want to Explain Your Science to the Public, Here's Some Advice

Recently, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, urged scientists to share their problem-solving innovations with the public in more accessible ways, including by using vernacular languages. This kind of openness and accessibility is important and needed. While most scientists publish their work in academic journals, only ten people, on average, read a given article in its entirety; so clearly, the general public is not being reached that way.

Translating complicated concepts that are jargon-heavy into terms and ideas the public can understand is not always easy. But, increasingly, scientists, university and research institutions, government institutions, and others are trying to find ways to do it. Professional societies like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Entomological Society of America offer a wide array of tools and programs like science communication courses and science policy fellowships to help scientists with dissemination. The National Academy of Sciences even recently released a report, “Communicating Science Effectively: A Research Agenda,” to help scientists effectively communicate their research. An example of an international effort is the Imagine Project initiative, through which scientists take their research out of the laboratory and share it with rural and indigenous communities in Africa and Latin America.

These are great initiatives, but many young scientists, including PhD students, post-doctoral scholars, and early-career scientists need more guidance in maneuvering the art of effectively disseminating their science to the public. I witnessed this need first-hand when I recently spoke at Emory University about my research on beneficial soil microbes and their use in agriculture; I mentioned however since I learning the art of writing opinion pieces through participating in a training offered through the Aspen Institute New Voices fellowship, I had written more than 60 opinion pieces that have reached millions of people. The audience of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows clamored to know how they could similarly write about their research for newspapers and reach the kinds of audiences their journal articles never do. I know they are not alone in that desire.


While there are other ways to disseminate academic research to the public, including writing research and policy briefs, sharing it on university and research institutions websites and blogs, my experience of this has been through op-ed writing. This is my advice to scientists who also want to use op-eds to reach the average person:

The first step is to connect the research you are doing or pursuing to a bigger theme. Is it the environment? Climate change? Public health? As an example, my research on beneficial soil microbes ties into several major themes including climate change, food security and soil health.
Secondly, it is important to find the story and storyline in your research. How do the results of your research creatively link and connect to the global challenges facing humanity? Once you have this lined up, it is time to write the piece.

Op-eds are centered around an argument: essentially you are arguing for or against something. So, you must decide on this before you can write the rest of your piece. The core argument should only be a sentence long and stated in a way that is convincing to your readers. Think as you decide on this: What do you want to share with the world? Is it new? Why is it new? Or what is new about it? How is it different from other arguments about the subject theme that have been shared before?

Next, you need to build your evidence to support your argument. Often there are at least three main points of evidence. These pieces of evidence can include statistics and research, quotes from experts in the field, anecdotes and personal stories and news articles. For researchers, this should be easy since your piece will be focused on research findings.


The “to be sure” paragraph is an important part of an opinion piece. In this paragraph, you preempt people who may discount your argument by acknowledging their viewpoint and then by bringing in even more evidence to back up your own argument. This allows you to acknowledge the other side, but still, support your own.

An element of an op-ed that differs greatly from academic writing is the news hook. While often this goes in the first paragraph of the piece, it does not always have to be placed there. What a news hook does is tie your argument and research to the current issues of the day to show how it’s timely and why your research matters right now. This also helps when pitching your piece to editors because they need to know what is new and timely about your piece before deciding to accept it. While a news hook could be a news story, it can also include new research and studies, a new piece of legislation, or a holiday or anniversary of an event or law. A recent personal experience can also be used as a news hook.

The final concluding paragraph is where you summarize all the paragraphs with a catchy and thought-provoking sentence. This is also where you can place your call to action. Why did you spend all that time doing your research? What do you want your readers and decision-makers to do?


Most importantly, always remember to keep everything short and to the point because many media outlets have a word limit that ranges from 500 to 900 words. And then your piece is ready to pitch!
When scientists write and share their work with the public inaccessible ways, that is when the magic happens and we can build bridges between research and society, engage the general public and develop a critical dialogue about the solutions science offers.


The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
 




Esther Ngumbi
From: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/.../if-you-want-to-explain-your-science- to-the-public-heres-some-advice/