Assessment “Jargon Glossary”

Great for those of us who are not sure about the intricacies of complex sentences, subordinates clauses and stylistic devices!!!

Writing Assessment Jargon Glossary

Adverbial phrase (a group of two or more words acting as an adverb, i.e. telling you how the action was performed. E.g She suddenly jumped up. laughing out loud). ‘suddenly’ is an adverb, ‘jumped up’ is the verb, ‘laughing out loud’ is the adverbial phrase that tells you how she jumped up.

Clause (a group of words with a meaning).

Colloquial form (everyday use of language; less formal).

Complex sentence (a sentence containing a main clause and also at

least one other subordinate clause or dependent clause. E.g. Because of the cold, we lit a fire. The main clause is underlined and could act as a sentence on its own, however ‘Because of the cold’ is an additional clause, which makes the sentence complex and could not be used as a sentence on its own. To avoid confusing my class, I simply refer to them as ‘extra clauses’).

Compound sentence (a sentence that contains two independent clauses, joined by a connective like ‘and’, ‘so’ or ‘yet’. For example: Harry went fishing and Imogen played football. Both of these clauses could work independently as sentences and not as clauses that depend on others to work as a sentence).

Determiner (often a short word that precedes a noun or noun-phrase. E.g. the oven, some glistening keys, an apple, both windows. The underlined words are all determiners).

Evidence of Audience (in writing terms, this is a common reference to a writer’s awareness of their audience being reflected in their word choice. E.g.when writing about a Year 6 residential trip, ‘Your child will be safe on the trapeze’ is written for a parental audience, whereas ‘You will be safe on the trapeze’ is written for a child audience.

Expanded Noun Phrase (these add extra detail to a noun. E.g. I saw my friend’s rustic wooden bench. ‘my friend’s rustic wooden bench’ is the expanded noun phrase).

Grapheme (how a phoneme is written. E.g the ‘s’ phoneme could be written with the grapheme of ‘c’, as in ‘city’, ‘ss’ as in ‘confess’ or ‘se’, as in ‘close.’)

Monosyllabic (a word with one syllable. E.g ‘hair’, ‘dog’ and ‘left’).

Phoneme (a single sound, often used when teaching phonics. E.g ‘this’ contains three separate sounds: ‘th’, ‘i’ and ‘s’).

Polysyllabic (a word consisting or more than one syllable. E.g. ‘water’ two syllables, ‘thesaurus’ three syllables and ‘mobile’ two syllables).

Preposition (a word that usually indicates the position of something. E.g. against the radiator, beneath the table, throughout the year).

Pronoun (a word that substitutes a noun, noun phrase or proper noun. E.g. The boy was hungry = He was hungry and Closing suddenly, the gate creaked = closing suddenly, it creaked).

Simple sentence (a sentence that contain one independent clause and no dependent clause. E.g. The boy walked into his bedroom).

Stylistic devices (methods that a writer can use to make their writing more powerful and interesting. E.g. similes, rhetorical questions, alliteration and repetition for emphasis).

Subject (a thing, place, person or idea in a sentence that is doing or being something. E.g. The computer would not start. Carelessly he threw the ball.)

Subordinate clause (also known as embedded clauses or dependent

clauses that cannot act as a sentence on their own. E.g Everything was fine until I dropped the plate. Because of the heat, we stayed inside).