#GrammarSeries – If you say ‘on the light’, you’re wrong

social-media-tips-for-bloggers

Hello Sparkle Writers and how is your day going?

Today’s grammar post is quite straightforward as you can see from the title.

Have you ever heard anyone say ‘on the light?’ Or have you actually said that before? This is absolutely wrong. ‘On‘ is not a verb. It is a preposition.

Most times you make that mistake when you are speaking, not writing. But as writers our speech should as grammatically correct as our writing.

A preposition is a word that links a noun, pronoun, or noun phrase to some other part of the sentence and a verb while a verb is a word used to describe an action, state, or occurrence, and forms the main part of the predicate of a sentence.

So you can see there is a huge difference between a preposition and a verb.

In this context, you can only use ‘on’ with verbs like put and switch to make it a phrasal verb

So you should say:

Put on/ Switch on the light.’

Until next week remember to keep your grammar in check.

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. ( Log Out / Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s