Grammar Done Good

In the interest of promoting August vacations, this month, I’m going to relax a bit and point you to the pages of two of my favorite grammar influencers.

Check out my favs:

Elle Cordova: https://www.youtube.com/@ElleCordova. Elle is a multihyphenate performer. She’s listed as a singer-songwriter, but more than that, her YouTube videos on grammar are intelligent, clever, and hysterical. This video continues the saga with the Grammarian: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1CZokjXdINw. I love the Oxford comma one, too: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ky0YOo7_Y0o.

Ellen Jovin: https://www.rebelwithaclause.com/. Check out Ellen’s movie Rebel with a Clause, produced and directed by husband Brandt Johnson. Ellen traveled the United States chatting with locals about grammar. The discussions are enlightening.

I’m not sure why a person’s name needs to be in the “Ellen” family to make grammar fun 😊, but I hope you enjoy these. Please share your favorites in the comments below.

Okay, I will add a grammar thought about “-ed” words, brought to my attention by a very bright student I currently work with who speaks English as a second language. I used the phrase “I am concerned,” and she said, “Oh, passive voice.”

That sentence is not passive voice. I is the subject, am is the verb, and concerned is an adjective describing the subject.

My friend asked, “Isn’t that sentence like this passive-voice sentence: It is constructed”?

That sentence is, indeed, passive voice. It is the object, is constructed is the passive-voice construction of the verb, and there is no subject. (Who constructed it?)

What tripped her up was that the adjective concerned followed the to-be verb is, making is look like a helping verb in passive-voice construction.

I am concerned is the same construction as I am happy. Because concerned ends in “ed,” new readers and writers can get confused. Thus, harking back to last month’s blog about passive and active voice, you can ask yourself if there is a main subject before the main verb actually doing the main verb. If so, it’s active.

Happy end of summer! And please leave an Amazon or Goodreads review for any Vacation Friend Romances you’ve read. It really helps!