Lesson 5: Reading Authors

Skill Lessons

Verbs

Since you began this course, you have learned much about sentences and the way they are formed. You have worked with nouns and subjects of sentences. In this lesson, we focus on the predicate part of the sentence, which contains a verb. The verb can be one word or several words. There are different types of verbs, as discussed below.

Action Verbs

An action verb shows action. That seems easy enough, doesn’t it? To find the verb in a sentence, I first look for the subject and then ask myself, “What is the subject doing?” You can also think about what happened to the subject. For example:

The bronco bucked in the dusty corral.

The subject (who or what the sentence is about) is “bronco.” What did the bronco do? Bucked. So “bucked” is the verb that shows the action of the subject. It shows what the bronco did. And it shows action. What else could the bronco have done? Snorted, jumped, trotted, reared, etc. These are all action verbs. Try writing some action verbs in your journal. Think about what you did yesterday or today as a starting point. Share your work with your parent/teacher. You can read more about action verbs on page 425 of Writers Express.

Linking Verbs

Sometimes verbs do not show action, but they link different parts of the sentence. They connect the subject with the word or words in the predicate. Linking verbs are sometimes called “state of being” verbs. This is hard for some people to understand. If you learn the main linking verbs by memorizing them, they will be easier to identify.

• be
• am
• is
• are
• was
• were
• been

There are other linking verbs, but if you learn these, you will start to recognize how the other linking verbs work.

The linking verb always connects the subject with a word in the predicate. The linking verb helps explain the subject further. For example:

The bronco is a wild horse.

In this sentence, the bronco isn’t actually doing anything. The word “is” connects the subject (“The bronco”) to the predicate part of the sentence (“a wild horse”) by showing state of being.

Here is another example:

The bronco was once a wild horse.

Do you see how using “was” changes the state of being? It shows that the bronco is not a wild horse now, but it was at one time. The bronco still isn’t doing anything, but the word “was” links the subject with the rest of the sentence and makes the meaning clear for the reader. You can read more about linking verbs on page 426 of Writers Express.

Self-Check: Find the verb in each sentence below and type it in the first box after the sentence. In the second box, choose whether it is an action verb or a linking verb. Share your work with your parent/teacher, then check your answers.

In your journal, write five sentences with action verbs and five sentences with linking verbs. (Use the list of linking verbs above to help you.) Share your work with your parent/teacher.

Main Verbs and Helping Verbs

Helping verbs support the main verb in some sentences. Helping verbs are actually easy to pick out, because they are usually small words. Most of the time, helping verbs are found right in front of the main verb. They are helping verbs if they help give information about a main verb. They are different from linking verbs, because they work with another verb instead of standing alone. You can find more information about helping verbs on page 426 in Writers Express. The sample sentences below should help you understand the difference between linking and helping verbs.

I was a teacher.

In this sentence, “was” is a linking verb, because it links the subject (“I”) with “teacher.”

I was going to the grocery store.

In this sentence, “was” is a helping verb, because it is part of the whole verb, “was going.”

When you use the helping verbs “am,” “is,” “are,” “was,” or “were,” the main verbs will often end in the suffix -ing.

The bronco was bucking in the corral.

When you use the helping verbs “has,” “have,” or “had,” the main verb often ends in the suffix -ed.

The bronco had bucked for more than an hour.

Self-Check: In the sentences below, find the helping verb and the main verb. Type the helping verb into the first box and the main verb into the second box. Share your work with your parent/teacher, then check your answers.

Verb Tense

Using a helping verb often tells the reader the tense of the verb. Tense refers to whether something is happening in the past, present, or future. Adding suffixes (an ending added to a word like “jumped”) or using helping verbs can change the tense of a verb. In the example we have been looking at about the bronco, the present tense of the verb is actually “bucks.” If we want the sentence to say that it is happening right now, we would write it in the present tense:

The bronco bucks in the corral.

Past tense means that the event happened in the past, and it is often formed by adding the suffix -ed to the base verb. In this case, we would write it this way:

The bronco bucked in the corral.

Can you see how this tells us that this happened in the past? It is not happening “right now.”

The past participle is the past tense of a verb when used with the helping verbs “have,” “has,” and “had.” For example, “I played ball” is past tense. If you use a helping verb, the sentence becomes “I have played ball.”

Using the future tense of a verb tells us that the event has not happened yet. Our bronco sentence would look like this:

The bronco will buck in the corral.

See how we used the helping word “will” to show that the event will happen in the future? You can read more about tenses on page 427 of Writers Express.

Self-Check: In the sentences below, choose whether the tense of the sentence is past, present, or future. Share your work with your parent/teacher, then check your answers.

Irregular Verbs

It is important to understand the tense of a verb to avoid making mistakes when writing. Not all verbs are what we call “regular” verbs. They do not follow the patterns I have shown you above. We call verbs that don’t follow the patterns “irregular” verbs. We will not study irregular verbs closely in this course, but they do need to be brought to your attention.

Most of the time, you use irregular verbs correctly, because you have heard them used correctly. Sometimes, though, you may hear people use them incorrectly so often that the incorrect forms begin to sound “right.” Let’s take the verb “come.” The present tense is “come,” as in the sentence, “I come to school every day.” The past tense would not be “comed,” would it? That sounds funny. Instead, we would say, “I came to school every day.”

Irregular verbs also have different forms when they are used with a helping verb in their past participle. On page 429 of Writers Express, you will find a chart listing different irregular verbs and their tenses. You can use this chart when you are writing, if you are unsure of what the correct form of a verb is.

Self-Check: In the table below, type the past, future, and past participle tenses of the irregular verbs listed, then check your answers.

Now that you know what a verb is, you can practice finding different types of verbs in sentences in your Daybook. See if you can identify helping verbs, different verb tenses, and irregular verbs in your reading from this unit. Share your work with your parent/teacher.

Before you begin to read your novel in lesson 6, complete the lesson 5 progress evaluation.