#GrammarSeries – What’s the big deal about Gerunds?

Grammar concept with toy dice

Hello Grammar lovers! On today’s #GrammarSeries we are talking about Gerunds.

Although the term might sound foreign, the gerund is a common part of speech that most of us use every day, whether we know it or not.

Today’s post will help you identify what you have been using before or what you have been struggling to recognize.

All gerunds end in ‘ing’, but this doesn’t make them so easy to identify. Why? All present participles also end in ‘ing’.

So what’s the difference?

Gerunds function as nouns.  They can be subjects, objects, subject complements etc.

Present participles, on the other hand, complete progressive verbs or act as modifiers.

Here are two examples to help you understand them better.

  • My father’s first love is singing.

Singing is acting as the subject complement of the verb ‘is’.

  • Acting comes naturally to me.

Acting is the subject in this sentence.

Gerunds can be made negative by adding “not.”

Look at this example

  • The best thing for your health is not smoking.

Now that you know, we hope you can teach someone else or just share this post with them.

 

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