Hello everyone. Welcome to another #theorythursday discussion.
Last week I talked about acrostics. Check that out if you haven’t already. Today I am going to talk about another aspect of grammar. I am going to talk about word order and why it is important.
Let’s dive in.
What does word order mean?
Word order refers to the way words are traditionally arranged in a sentence.
The most common or standard word order that one will come across in English is Subject, Verb, Object.
You can break this down into letters so that it is easier to remember – S-V-O.
I am going to create a few examples.
The man (subject) parked (verb) his new car (object) in his driveway.
The girl (subject) ran (verb) the race (object) and won.
The subject is what the sentence is about, which is why the subject tends to come first in the word order. The verb usually follows because a verb is a doing word and so it makes sense for the verb to follow the subject because that tells us what the subject is doing.
Here is another example.
The dog (subject) digs (verb) holes (object) in the garden.
Why is word order important?
Word order is important because word order is what leads to a sentence making sense.
You can say “The dog eats dinner at seven”, because grammatically that makes sense. You cannot say “Eats the dog at seven dinner”, because in this order, these words are messy, they don’t make much sense although you can still find meaning in those words.
When the word order is correct, the sentence will make much more sense and it will be easier to read. It will be cleaner. It will be easier for a reader to follow.
It may seem obvious or insignificant or even a little boring, but word order is one of things we naturally learn and sometimes we don’t know there is a name for it. When we learn to speak and when we are in school, we are taught to compose sentences and then when we get older, we do this naturally and we might not even realise that word order is in fact an aspect of grammar, and an important one too. If the word order is changed, then an entire sentence’s meaning can be changed and it is important to be able to recognise this as a reader.
This has been Theory Thursday. Happy Friday Eve.
Kate xo.
Katelovesliterature.com 