Grammar Foundations

Welcome: words at work

Slides 1–5.

The course sets three goals:

• Know the nouns. Use nouns like a pro: as subjects, objects, plurals, and possessives.
• Make your mark. Pick up on patterns and learn the rules of punctuation that matter in your workplace writing.
• Equip to explain. Gain confidence and knowledge to write well and convey key grammar concepts to others.

You know more than you think you do. We’ll unpack, study, and give names to words at work. Grammar is simply a way of seeing and sharing how words work to make sentences.

The building blocks

Building blocks allow us to share ideas and information:

• Namers: nouns, pronouns.
• Describers: adjectives, adverbs.
• Actions: verbs.
• Connectors: prepositions, conjunctions.

Where do we get the rules?

• Your agency style guide.
• The Gregg Reference Manual, 11th edition.

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Knowing the nouns

Slides 6–20.

What do we name?

A noun names one of eight things:

1. People: Killian, student, gamer, hiker.
2. Activities: swimming, working, processing, filing.
3. Concepts: sportsmanship, resilience, honesty, moderation.
4. Conditions: health, sickness, peace, strife.
5. Events: orientation, homecoming, prom, graduation.
6. Feelings: relaxation, enthusiasm, interest, acceptance.
7. Groups: Modern Language Association, Adobe, campers, applicants.
8. Times: dusk, dawn, curfew, evening.

Name the nouns

Try it! Find and name all the nouns in this sentence, then open the reveal.

Occupancy rates at group camps day-use shelters allow 15 persons from two different households.

Attributive nouns

Attributive nouns come before another noun to add an attribute. They add a feature, characteristic, element, trait, or similar info to the next noun. Attributive nouns don’t have comparative forms.

The tradesperson performing plumbing or elevator installation must hold a Washington license.

Try it! Name the attributive nouns in this sentence, then open the reveal.

We inspect office buildings every five years and apartment buildings every three years.

A try-it activity and its review follow in class.

Titles: proper and common

Three examples show when a title is proper and when it stays common:

• Fiscal Impact Statements must be written in clear and concise language, avoid legal and technical terms when possible, and be filed with the secretary of state no later than the tenth day of August.
• Secretary Wyman shares Washington’s election administration and cybersecurity practices with organizations across the country.
• Kim Wyman became Washington’s 15th Secretary of State.

What should I do? Check your agency style guide! You’ll see how to use names, titles, acronyms, and styles in your work.

Titles for humans

Titles are always proper when they come before a name: capitalize them.

• President Obama.
• Chief Executive Officer Lacy.
• Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
• Communications Director Brionna Aho.

Governor is always proper: capitalize it, according to the Washington State Executive & General Correspondence Guidelines.

• Governor Jay Inslee.
• Jay Inslee, Governor, signed . . .
• For letters the Governor will sign, he prefers . . .
• Jay Inslee, Washington State Governor, said . . .

High-ranking titles

How do we define “high-ranking” titles for public sector workplace writing?

• National officials: President; Vice President; Cabinet members—the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, heads of government agencies, the Ambassador, the Speaker of the House, the Representative, the Senator, the Chief Justice of the United States.
• State officials: Governor, Lieutenant Governor.
• Foreign dignitaries: the Queen of England, the King, the Prime Minister.
• International figures: the Pope, the Secretary-General of the United Nations.

We don’t usually capitalize state-level titles when they follow a personal name. You may do so, in line with your agency norms.

What if the title follows the name? Capitalize “high-ranking” titles even when they follow a name. You can choose to keep other titles proper out of respect, or you can make them common. What does your style guide say?

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Capitalizing, continued

Slides 21–42. Four poll stops in this stretch (slides 22, 25, 27, and 31) ask what you think before a rule appears.

Capitalization in pleadings: courts and court documents

The next rules are agency-specific guidance for writers who prepare pleadings—punctuation and capitalization for court filings.

Capitalize “Court” when naming any court in full or when referring to the U.S. Supreme Court. Also capitalize “Court” in a court document when referring to the court that will receive that document:

• This Court has already ruled on Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss.
• But: The issue has been examined by many courts.

Document titles also relate to what the court will receive. Capitalize the title of a court document only when the document has been filed in the matter that is the subject of your document, and you refer to the document’s actual title or a shortened form of it.

• Plaintiffs filed their Motion to Strike Expert Testimony on July 12, 2022.
• A motion to strike must meet the requirements of the local rules.

Capitalize the first word

Capitalize the first word in each of the following sentence types.

• Every sentence: Try to balance your email messages with phone calls. Our new supervisor gave us an impossible deadline.
• A quoted sentence: Mr. Jones said, “Sally knows this program well.”
• An independent question within a sentence after “is” or “was”: The question is, Does the staff agree with your proposal?
• Each item displayed in a breakout list or outline: This problem-solving tool will help you: Become a better manager. Improve your relations with coworkers. Cope with stressful situations on the job.

Groups, boards, and committees

One more piece of the pleadings guidance: capitalize “board” only when referring to a specific body already mentioned by its full name.

• The Executive Ethics Board becomes the Board.
• There are committees and boards in various branches of government.

Capitalize names of groups within your own organization when the name follows the word the. Do not capitalize names preceded by other words.

Governments and their subdivisions

What other names should you capitalize? Countries, international organizations, bodies of government, and subdivisions of those entities:

• Thurston County.
• the House (House of Representatives).
• the Washington Legislature.
• the United Nations.
• I have visited every state in the Union. (Specific government: United States.)

Federal and state

Capitalize federal only when it’s part of the official name of a federal agency, act, or proper name:

• Federal Reserve Board, Federal Insurance Contributions Act—but not “the federal government” or “federal judge.”

Capitalize state only when it follows the name of a state or in an imaginative name:

• Washington State, New York State, Empire State, Evergreen State—but not “the state of Washington” or “the state of New York.”

Unless you write legal documents under The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation, do not capitalize state alone when referring to Washington State.

Other puzzlers

Points on the compass

When do points on the compass become proper nouns? When you use them as names, to name a specific region, or to refer to specific people in a region or their activities:

• Pacific Northwest—but not “We live on the northwest side of town.”
• West Coast—but not “Go west on Highway 90.”
• Southern hospitality—but not “They experienced a southern winter.”

Don’t capitalize direction words when they merely show direction or general location or characteristics of geography and climate: westerly winds, the eastern side of Thurston County, southern temperatures.

Seasons

What about seasons? Nope. Don’t capitalize the names of seasons in business or technical writing.

Acts, laws, bills, and treaties

Do you capitalize short form references to acts, laws, bills, treaties? Not usually—unless you’re drafting legal documents. The Gregg Reference Manual (paragraph 346) directs you to capitalize full-length citations or specific laws, bills, and treaties, but not common nouns that stand in for the full name. That looks like: First Amendment (U.S. Constitution) but not the amendment.

Races, peoples, tribes, and languages

Capitalize the proper names of races, peoples, tribes, and languages. These names may form proper adjectives—capitalize them: Americans, Canadians, English Language, First Nations, the Chinese, Spanish-speaking stakeholders.

Decades and centuries

Do you capitalize the names of decades and centuries? No.

Historical events and periods

Capitalize the names of historical events and imaginative names given to historical periods and to cultural ages. Don’t capitalize references to current time, like post-millennial: the American Revolution, the Great Depression, the Bronze Age, the Middle Ages.

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Forming plurals and possessives

Slides 43–55.

A job aid on plural patterns travels with this part of the course.

Pluralizing compound words

Possessives

Possessives show a relationship of belonging between one thing and another. They show ownership and intangible connections, such as where one spends time. To form the possessive, you’ll usually add an apostrophe + s to the noun:

America has incredible national parks: they are America’s parks.

Single and possessive: the boss’s computer (the boss—singular, just one).

If the noun is plural, add only an apostrophe at the end:

• The judicial clerks’ tasks include the review and research required to write a draft opinion for the judge.
• We will send all schedule changes to our bosses’ assistants within 24 hours.

Possessives of compound nouns

For compound singular nouns (solid, spaced, or hyphenated), add an apostrophe + s to the last element of the word: stockbroker’s advice (solid), notary public’s seal (spaced), owner-manager’s decision (hyphenated).

To form the plural possessive of a compound noun, first form the plural: one stockbroker, two stockbrokers. Then, if the plural noun ends in s, add only an apostrophe: two stockbrokers’ bids. If the plural does not end in s, add an apostrophe + s to the end: editor in chief, editors in chief, editors in chief’s contributions.

A practice block on plural possessives follows in class.

Separate and joint possession

• To show separate possession, add the sign of the possessive to the name of each individual: The buyer’s and the seller’s signatures must appear on the bill of sale. The Joneses’ and the Browns’ houses are across the street from each other.
• To show joint possession (two or more parties share something they both possess), add the sign of the possessive to the final name only: The Browns and the Tillmans’ property line splits the subdivision in half. (The Browns and the Tillmans share a property line.)

Inanimate objects, time, and measurement

To show belonging or relationship between inanimate objects, use the word of and allow the preposition to show relationship—don’t use an apostrophe: the wording of the agreement, not the agreement’s wording.

In common expressions referring to time, measurements, and personification you may use the possessive form: at arm’s length, one day’s notice, the computer’s memory.

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Using structure to create clarity

Slides 56–72.

Structure is the order in which words appear in sentences: The specialist records observations in a journal.

Nouns and pronouns get cases: subjective case (subjects) or objective case (objects). “Case” tells the relationship of nouns and pronouns to the verb.

One sentence, taken apart

The course walks one sentence through every role. Try each question before you open its reveal.

An ecologist collects samples for the water quality program.

Which word or words show action?

Who or what takes that action?

An ecologist collects . . . what?

What word links or shows the relationship of the samples to the water quality program?

Prepositional phrases

Also know this—a preposition often starts a special phrase. That phrase will always end with a noun. A preposition is a link between two nouns and shows how they relate, so a prepositional phrase always ends in the second, related noun. This phrase is called a prepositional phrase.

In our sentence, “for the water quality program” is the whole prepositional phrase. The word program completes the phrase: it’s the object of the preposition.

The subject cannot come from within a prepositional phrase. These nouns are objects that receive action or the results of action.

A try-it activity and its review follow in class.

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Understanding comma use

Slides 73–92. The slides number these rules 1–10 and skip number 5.

The comma gives a brief pause or clarifies meaning. Most of us know to place a comma between two adjectives that describe the same word. Here the comma acts as the word “and”:

We must encourage straightforward, meaningful dialog.

We also use the comma for the rules below. Decide stops between the rules let you punctuate sentences yourself; they appear at the end of this section, answers behind reveals.

Rules 1 to 4

1. Separate an introductory phrase or clause (subordinate or dependent) from the rest of the sentence: Smiling at her peers, Sarah handed a copy of the report to each person at the table.
2. Separate independent sentences joined by a conjunction: Sue wrote the report, and Tom presented it to the management team.
3. Distinguish items in a series. Yes, the comma does come before the “and” in a series: Please equally divide my estate among my heirs—Sally, Hank, and Rick.
4. Separate two identical words appearing together in a sentence, especially verbs: Whoever stands, stands alone. Truly, truly I say to you—love your neighbor as yourself.

The exception to rule 1: no commas appear after ordinary introductory adverbs or short introductory phrases that answer these questions:

• When: In 2008. Today. Recently. In the morning.
• How often: Occasionally. Often. Frequently.
• Where: Here. At the meeting. In this case.
• Why: For that reason. Because of this situation.

See the difference: transition words that open a sentence still take a comma; short openers that tell why do not.

Rules 6 to 10

6. Set off added information (nonessential) embedded in a sentence: Jack believes, no doubt, his way is best.
7. Set off added afterthoughts at the end of a sentence: This city became incorporated 1991, if I remember correctly.
8. Set off an interrupting expression when a compound sentence is joined by a conjunction, and the interrupting expression occurs at the beginning of the second sentence. Set off the interrupting expression with two commas, but omit the comma you’d usually place before the conjunction: I piled all the unpacked moving boxes in the garage and, believe me, I took months to find my boots.
9. Set off the conjunction as well as a subordinate or dependent clause when the element that follows and is a subordinate or dependent clause rather than an interrupting expression. Be sure to put a comma at the end of the subordinate or dependent clause: I had to take the meeting notes by hand, and if Mark had not also taken notes, I would have missed some key points.
10. Set off the conjunction, but not the transitional expression that follows, when a coordinating conjunction and a transitional expression both occur at the start of the second sentence. We don’t treat the transitional expression as an interrupting expression: You can set your own flex hours, and furthermore you may telecommute.

Transitional expressions

Two families of connecting words join ideas of equal weight:

• Coordinating conjunctions—a comma comes before each: and, but, nor, or, so, yet, thus, then, hence.
• Conjunctive adverbs—a semicolon comes before each, and a comma follows each: consequently, furthermore, hence, however, moreover, nevertheless, otherwise, subsequently, therefore, thus.

On the slide, hence and thus carry an asterisk in the second list: they are the exception, and no comma follows them.

Both patterns at work:

You may set your own flex hours; furthermore, you may commute.

You may set your own flex hours, and furthermore you may commute.

Decide: add a comma, or no comma needed?

Punctuate each sentence yourself, then open its reveal. A try-it activity and review run in class.

You may set your own flex hours furthermore you may commute.

Perhaps the management team changed the approach.

We were indeed surprised at their lack of judgment.

However brilliant his work may be Mike will not win the contract until his attitude changes.

The month before the manager told all employees of the policy change.

We set the specifications for the contract and we expect you to use them.

We set the specifications for contracts and monitor compliance.

Only cash or purchase orders or checks are acceptable.

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Great work

Slide 93.

Great work! You’ve named the nouns, made your mark, and equipped yourself to explain the rules to others.

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