Reducing Adverb Clauses to Phrases (1 of 4) - Advanced English Grammar-

It may surprise you to know

that I really enjoy scary stories.

Not the kind with monsters and killing,

but the kind with strange sounds at night

and mysterious shadows.

These stories are thrilling

because I know they're just for fun.

We especially like scary stories in October

here in the U.S.

That's when we celebrate Halloween.

Well, a good story is enjoyable any time of the year,

and I'd like to share a story with you now

to help us talk about a grammar point.

Adverb clauses and how we reduce them to phrases.

The first time you hear the story,

don't concern yourself with structures.

Just enjoy the story.

Try to focus on what's happening.

That's the first step to mastering a grammar point:

understanding the meaning.

After reading the story, we'll look more closely at the words and forms I chose to use.

Let me ask you some questions.

This story is what we'd call realistic fiction.

I made it up, but it could happen in real life.

I do have a husband that snores.

Have you ever heard strange sounds at night?

Did they alarm you?

Let's talk about grammar now.

In the text, I placed a number of phrases in bold.

Those phrases act like adverbs.

They were formed from adverb clauses.

As you may know, there are different types of adverb clauses.

For example, and adverb clause can express...

To keep things simple in this lesson,

we'll only look at adverb clauses of time

and adverb clauses of reason.

Adverb clauses of time begin with words like...

Adverb clauses of reason begin with words like...

Adverb clauses are dependent clauses.

They can't stand alone.

They give important information,

but they're not complete sentences.

To form a complete sentence,

we use an adverb clause and a main clause, an independent clause.

This is the main part of our sentence,

and the adverb clause gives more information.

For example, when something happened or why something happened.

Let me give you examples.

Our first example is a line from the story.

Let me give you a second example.

Do you see the two adverb clauses?

Here they are.

They're adverb clauses of time.

They answer the question WHEN?

When did these events happen?

The events are told in the main part of the sentence.

The adverb clauses then give information about when.

Look closely and you'll see that all the clauses,

both dependent and independent, have a subject and a verb.

Our example:

This phrase has a verb form, but no subject.

That's an important difference between a phrase and a clause.

We can often reduce adverb clauses to shorter phrases.

These shorter phrases can give our writing a better flow.

They're common in fiction, in the news, in reports.

They're less common in conversation.

Now let's look at how we reduce the full adverb clauses to phrases.