Q & A

SENTENCE STRUCTURE

This was the closing line of a story I heard on the news last night.
What is wrong with the line?
Correct it.

"No word on charges."
Jim Crichton, A-News, Monday, July 28, 2008, 11:31 pm.


"THEIR" CONTROVERSY

I received a comment yesterday about the following sentence: "Sierra and Cody told us that their grades were better than ours but we didn't believe them."

This was taken from the TV show, Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
The problem for the commentor was the number of plural pronouns in the sentence.

So, read the sentence and identify how many plural pronouns are in there?
(Hint: the show experts were correct. Proof below. I am breaking precedent here.)


TODAY'S WORD

The word for today is "vestigial".
Define "vestigial" and use it in a sentence.



PRONOUNS

There are five plural pronouns in the sentence: "us", "their", "ours", "we" and "them".
"Their" is a plural, possessive pronoun, used as an adjective to modify the noun "grades" and is called a pronominal adjective.
"Their" is a pronoun. Its function is as an adjective which is a word that modifies or describes a noun.