Study Skills - English - Nursing, Health & Social Care and Allied Health Professions

English Skills

Word grammer

Verb Verbs are words that describe some sort of action. Examples include walk, press and eat.

Adverb Adverbs describe the way something happens, like 'gently', 'always' or 'today'.

Noun Nouns are names of things or places, like ‘picture’, ‘dog' or ‘school’. Proper nouns are words that are the actual name of something - for example, Steve, Birmingham or Volkswagen. They always begin with a capital letter.

Pronoun Pronouns are short words like, 'it', 'she', 'he', 'you', 'we', 'they', 'us' and 'them'. They are used to describe either individual or groups of people, rather than using their name or names.

Adjective Adjectives are used to describe things, people or places, like 'stripy', 'soft' or 'warm'.

Connective Words like 'and', 'so' or 'because' are used to connect phrases together into longer sentences.

Punctuation

The English punctuation system has evolved in tandem with the traditions of writing and printing. Some elements of punctuation go back to medieval manuscripts, but their shapes and uses varied until well into C17, and were formalized only in C18. The contribution of space to the punctuation system(e.g. word space, space between sentences) has only recently been recognized. The punctuation marks which appear in modern English are as follows:∗for sentence punctuation brackets/parentheses colon comma ellipsis em rule / em dashen rule / en dash exclamation mark full stop / period question mark quotation marks semicolon

∗for word punctuation acute apostrophe cedilla circumflex dieresis grave hacek hyphen solidus/slash tilde umlaut

Peters, P. (2004) The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available at: https://search-ebscohost-com.proxy.library.lincoln.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=161143&site=eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: 1 April 2022).

Punctuation

Past, present and future tense