Last updated June 15, 1999
 
 
Dr. Ed Vavra's KISS Approach to Sentence Structure


Exercises for Level One

     First, study the instructional material on prepositional phrases, and on compounding. Glance at the material on ellipsis. Then select any exercise. The directions are always the same:

Place parentheses ( ) around every prepositional phrase. 
Draw a curved line from each opening paren 
to the word that the phrase modifies.

Once you have completed an exercise, go back to the Main Menu of Exercises to get the answer key. (Yes, I have intentionally made it difficult to get to them.) Keep doing these exercises until you get at least two completely (100%) correct. Then you can move on to Level Two.


Begin with some jokes?
(Who says grammar exercises must be boring?)

Joke # 1 Joke # 2 Joke # 3
Joke # 4 Joke # 5 Joke # 6
Joke # 7 Joke # 8 Joke # 9

Try a few of Aesop's Fables?

Fable # 1 Fable # 2 Fable # 3
Fable # 4 Fable # 5 Fable # 6
 
Opening Paragraphs of Famous Novels
Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter
Henry James' Daisy Miller
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer



*  Because jokes often imitate oral language, note the words of Isaac Asimov: "Remember, good spoken English is far less tolerant of long sentences and complicated subordinate clauses than good written English is, and far more tolerant of incomplete sentences and grammatical imprecision. Where written English must depend on careful punctuation, spoken English must depend on intonation, facial expression, and even gesticulation." (Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 58.)

This border is a reproduction of

Leonardo da Vinci's
(1452-1519)
Portrait of Ginevra Benci
1474-1476, Oil on wood, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 
from Mark Harden's Artchive http://artchive.com/core.html

Click here for the directory of my backgrounds based on art.

[for educational use only]