Monday, October 19, 2009

Old dog, new tricks


Wow, October's almost halfway gone! Where has the summer and the year gone?

This past week I finished first round edits on the next Halsey brother book, Doctor in Petticoats. The editor commented in a couple places about the verbs I used and called them intransitive verbs asking me to choose a different word. Before I could change them I had to see why she called them intransitive verbs. While I liked English in school and did well, I didn't retain all the info and I'm not even sure that was part of the info I learned.

Anyway, intransitive verbs are:
In grammar, an intransitive verb does not take an object. In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject), and hence has a valency of one. For example, in English, the verbs sleep and die, are intransitive. Some verbs, such as smell are both transitive and intransitive.

Some examples of sentences with intransitive verbs:

* Harry will sleep until sunrise. (sleep has no object)
* He died on Friday. (die has no object)
* You smell. (smell has no object)
* The bird tweeted. ("tweet" can never be transitive)
(from wikipedia)

Clear as mud isn't it? LOL Instead of going crazy figuring out exactly why the words didn't work, I used another word.

3 comments:

gtyyup said...

LOL...I'm confused! Writing has a whole lot more to it than one first thinks.

Lauri said...

Oh, good, Lord! I'm really SOL now!

Paty Jager said...

LOL to both Karen and Lauri!