Mastering the Mechanics: Introduction to Verbs

Last updated 5/31/2016

 

Visual: Walden logo at bottom of screen along with notepad and pencil background.

Audio: Guitar music.

 

Visual: “Walden University Writing Center. Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears in center of screen.

Background changes to a close up of a dictionary page and a bright green box that reads: “Mastering the Mechanics: Verb”

Slide changes to a mostly gray slide with the heading: Verbs

Below the text reads (with the bold words highlighted in blue):

  • Describe action or state of being
  • Necessary in every sentence

Wrong: All the nurses at the seminar.

Correct: All the nurses were at the seminar

            All the nurses attended the seminar

I will write my final paper on childhood obesity

He is an elementary school principal

There were no casualties in the accident.

I always begin my homework at 8pm.

 

Audio: Verbs. And verbs are a very important, in fact, a very necessary part of speech because verbs are needed in every single sentence. Without a verb, you have what’s called a sentence fragment. As you can see here, "All the nurses at the seminar." Well, there's no action in that sentence. Right? This idea is not complete. It's not clear what is actually happening in this sentence, so you need to add some sort of verb. For example, "All the nurses were at the seminar." or "All the nurses attended the seminar." I'm not going to read through these other  sample sentences down here, but you can see in these sentences the verbs are highlighted in blue and you can see that all of them do indeed include verbs.

 

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