Academic Writing: Common Sentence Patterns, Part Four

From VOA Learning English, this is Everyday Grammar.

English has many patterns. Learning and mastering these patterns can help you improve your writing

and speaking skills. They can also help you do better on your next grammar test.

Today, we explore a common verb pattern, the transitive verb pattern.

This pattern is common in writing, speaking, and even on language tests, such as the test

of English as a foreign language, or TOEFL.

To get you started thinking about transitive verbs, consider this stanza from Preface to

a 20 volume suicide note by the famous author Amiri Baraka.

By the end of this story, you will understand one transitive verb pattern that Baraka uses in this stanza.

In a previous Everyday Grammar, we discussed intransitive verbs.

One feature of intransitive verbs is that they do not require a complement.

In other words, there does not need to be a noun phrase or adjective to the right of

the verb in the sentence.

Unlike intransitive verbs, transitive verbs take one or more complements.

Complements, in this case, refer to nouns or noun phrases that are immediately to the

right of the verb in the sentence.

There are several types of transitive verbs, but they all have one thing in common, a direct object.

In its most basic form, the direct object is the noun phrase that follows a transitive verb.

A noun phrase is a noun and all the words and phrases that describe it.

The basic transitive verb pattern is this.

Transitive verbs are often, but by no means always, action words.

One way to know if the noun phrase is a direct object is if it is the receiver of the action of the verb. For example,

You can tell that the softball is receiving the action hit.

However, the direct object does not always have to be the receiver of an action. Consider this sentence.

In this sentence, it is hard to say that the direct object, the concert, is really receiving an action.

So this leads us to another way to think of the direct object.

It is the answer to a what or whom question. Consider these examples.

Once again, asking the what or whom question will not work all of the time,

but it can be a useful strategy to help you recognize the direct object.

So, if it can be difficult to find the direct object, how can you tell if a verb is transitive?

There are two reliable ways to check.

One reliable way to test if a verb is transitive is to change it to the passive voice.

Think back to the example sentence,

If you change it to the passive voice, the sentence would be

The softball was hit by Mary.

If you can change the sentence from active to passive voice, then the verb is probably transitive.

You can read more about the passive voice in a previous Everyday Grammar story.

A second way to check if a verb is transitive is to think about the two noun phrases surrounding a verb.

This strategy, say Robert Funk and Martha Cone, two English grammar experts,

is the best way to identify a transitive verb.

Here is the basic idea.

If the two noun phrases refer to different things, then you know the verb is transitive.

Think back to the sentence,

The subject, Mary, refers to one thing,

while the direct object, the softball, refers to a different thing.

In technical terms, you could say the two noun phrases have different referents.

Contrast this to a pattern we discussed in a previous Everyday Grammar, the B pattern.

We gave an example sentence from Christina Aguilera's song.

She sings, I am beautiful.

In that sentence, the word beautiful, the subject complement, refers to the subject, I.

They refer to the same person, that is, they have the same referent.

In English, words that come after a verb often give information about the verb.

Looking at what comes after a verb can really help you figure out the meaning of a verb,

even if you do not know it.

Now, think back to the stanza of Amiri Baraka's poem.

And now each night I count the stars, and each night I get the same number,

and when they will not come to be counted, I count the holes they leave.

You can see the transitive verb pattern clearly in this stanza. Consider the first line.

And now each night I count the stars.

Baraka starts the line with adverbial information and then uses the basic transitive verb pattern.

I count the stars. Noun plus transitive verb plus noun phrase.

How do you know the verb is transitive?

You could try asking a what question.

I count what? The stars.

Or you could even change the sentence to the passive voice.

I count the stars. The stars were counted by me.

A third option is to ask yourself what the noun phrases around the verb refer to.

You know it is transitive because the subject, I, refers to a person,

while the direct object, the stars, refers to something different from a person.

The second line, like the first line, uses a similar structure.

I get the same number. Or noun plus transitive verb plus noun phrase.

The remaining two lines in the stanza use structures that are more complex than the basic transitive verb pattern.

However, you can still see that writers can use basic patterns to create beautiful poetry.

To practice using transitive verb patterns, you can write a poem similar to Baraka's poem.

Be sure to choose new transitive verbs and new noun phrases that act as the direct object.

Write your poems in the comments section or on our Facebook page. I'm Jill Robbins. I'm Jonathan Evans. And I'm John Rossell.