Everyone does make mistakes, no matter big or small. As well as we born to this world, we are going to make mistakes in destiny. As a normal insane, I did make mistakes and I will not deny that I will continue making mistakes throughout my life eventually. However, to become a better "player" in this competitive world, I have spent plenty of time and effort to enhance my language. And one of my problems I faced currently is the grammar mistake, especially the preposition in sentences. In definition, a preposition is a word governing, and usually coming in front of, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element. ( English Club ) A preposition must be followed by a "noun" but not a verb. The "noun" can be including noun (cat, eye), proper noun (Mr.Yan, Malaysia), pronoun (I, you, we), noun group (my first friend) and gerund (jogging) as well. For an example, I go to school by bus. The "by" in the sentence is actually a preposition and it is followed by noun (bus). Sometimes, using wrong different preposition can give different messages. For instance, "The girl walks into the house." and "The girl walks to the house." show the different meaning indeed. Referring to my last assignment, I can find out my preposition's mistakes are based on the preposition of place and time. Instead of using "on 18th of August", I always made the mistakes by using "at 18th of August". Now I only realized that these are the areas i should pay attention to. In a nutshell, I believe practice makes perfect. In order to minimize my grammatical mistakes, I would not hesitate to make more practice, orally and manually.
Here are some exercises which I retrieved from ESL English Quiz
1. We must finish this job _ next Monday.
2. I stayed in New York _ two weeks.
3. We will have a party _ Christmas Eve.
4. The school library is open _ nine until four.
5. He will leave _ the morning of third.
English Club. ( n.d. ) English Preposition. Retrieved September 13,2008, from http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/prepositions.htm
Kelly, C. (2001,2004) Activities for ESL students: ESL English Quiz. Retrieved September
13, 2008, from http://a4esl.org/q/f/z/zz98bck.htm
2 comments:
hi, Yii Sam,
I post both W5T2 and W7T1 on my blog. Welcome you leave comments.
In your W5T2, 1st sentence," how mater how big or small they are" is more formal than yours in writing. I checked whether there are any preposition mistakes in your W5T2, and I didnot find, so I think you do well in preposition at least in this article. Usually, I use wrong preposition because it connects with wrong verb. Different verb will follow different proposition. I think it would be better to remember which verbs follow which preposition.
You have a pretty interesting outlook of mistakes in life! Now that you have identified your mistake, try improving on it by thinking of a logical link between the noun and the rest of the sentence. It may help you to deduce the appropriate preposition.
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