The English language has various continuous tenses. These tenses indicate actions that a continuous, or happening over a length of time. They have a main verb that takes on the -ing form (e.g. working, talking, running, etc). Anytime that the main verb appears in the -ing form, a helping verb is always necessary. It is never grammatical to use a verb with an -ing ending immediately after the subject:

     I going to school. (Subject — I)

     It raining outside. (Subject — it)

     Jack and Carl working at the department store. (Subject — Jack and Carl)

One example of a continuous tense is the present continuous. This tense indicates an action that is presently happening and will continue into the future. The present continuous will always use the present form of be as the helping verb before the -ing verb:

     I am going to school. (Am is the conjugated form of be for the subject I)

     It is raining outside. (Is is the conjugated form of be for the subject he/she/it)

     Jack and Carl are working at the department store. (Are is the conjugated form of be for the subject they)

Remember to always use the proper conjugations of to be in the present tense:

     I am
     You are
     He/she/it is
     We are
     They are

Commas have a number of functions in the English language. One of them is to indicate parentheses. A common error that students make in comma usage is in this area.

A parenthesis (plural: parentheses) is any set of words or any statement that provides additional explanation for a sentence, but is not part of the subject, verb, nor complement. A conventional sentence follows the subject-verb-complement format:

     James is an engineer.

In the above sentence, the subject is James, the verb is is, and the complement is an engineer. If we want to give more information about who James is in this sentence, then we would write that in parenthesis:

     James, a close friend of mine, is an engineer.

In the above example, a close friend of mine would be a parenthetical statement. Notice that there are now commas in the sentence to indicate parenthesis.

A parenthesis can also appear at the beginning or end of a sentence:

     A former gang member, Ken now works to keep youth away from gangs. (The parenthesis is at the beginning.)

     Kobe Bryant has 33,643 total career points, the third most of all-time in the NBA. (The parenthesis is at the end.)

Regardless of where the parenthesis is, the comma is the punctuation mark that indicates its presence.

A lot of times, students may use the correct word choice to express an idea, but they use the incorrect inflection of the word they are using, which makes their expression ungrammatical in the end:

     A pine tree is triangle. (Correct: A pine tree is triangular.)
     An armed force is responsible for a country's defend. (Correct: An armed force is responsible for a country's defence.)

In English, an inflection means the addition of a suffix to change its syntactical function without changing its form. It is very important to select the correct inflection so that your sentence is grammatical.

For the purpose of this post, we will look at the word, intelligent. The word intelligent is an adjective, so we would use it to describe a noun:

     Chris is an intelligent student.

If we add the suffix -ly to intelligent, we get intelligently, which is an adverb. Recall from the previous lesson about adjectives and adverbs that an adverb describes verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs:

     Chris spoke intelligently.

The last inflection we can use for intelligent would be intelligence, where we drop the "t" and replace it with a "ce". Intelligence is a noun:

     Chris has a high level of intelligence.

When deciding which inflection of a word to use, carefully consider what word class (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.) you need exactly. It is really that simple!