Superbowl Weekend! Clauses vs. Phrases! And the crowd...goes...wild!

Okay, so you might not go "wild" at the thought of comparing CLAUSES and PHRASES, but hopefully you will be sort of interested in them. One good reason to be interested in clauses and phrases is that they are two very basic types of groups of words, and understanding the differences between these two groups of words will give us a good foundation for going on to discuss all kinds of grammar errors writers make every day.

So, here we go:

Phrases are groups of words that lack a subject and a verb. There are all kinds of them; one of the most common is the "prepositional phrase," which functions as either an adjective "the dog in the laundry room" or as an adverb "knocked over the can of paint before turning over the trash can."

You can see from these phrases that even though phrases sometimes contain words that look like verbs (verbals), upon closer inspection the phrase itself has no verb. Likewise, the phrase has no subject. Here's a link to a great website that explains what phrases are and how they work.

As you can see if you keep reading that website, clauses are groups of words that do contain a subject and a verb. In fact, in order for a group of words to be a clause, it must contain both a subject and a verb. Here's a link to a little song that should explain everything you'll ever need to know about subjects and verbs. (I love school house rock. It makes me feel like everything is right with the world.)

Here's a clause: "Mr. and Mrs. Morton moved in together." And another: "Because they got married." See? Each of those clauses has both a subject and a verb. Simple.

Here's a clause: "After the wedding." And another: "To share a love of gardening." And another: "Traveling by public transit." No subjects, no verbs. So, not clauses.

Well, that's enough for today. If you have trouble differentiating between phrases and clauses, you can look in your St. Martin's Handbook. Good luck!