Tip 653: "What's a Gerund?"

From the Grammar Workshops: What’s a Gerund?

Our friends Jack Sederstrom and Paul Saltzgiver at WesTech Engineering asked two questions about grammar: 

      What’s a gerund? 

      What’s a dangling participle? 

We’ve explored neither in previous Tips. Not in twelve years. Twelve. Years.  

Maybe it’s time to do that. We’ll explore gerunds today. We’ll explore dangling participles next week.

So . . . what’s a gerund? 

Short answer: A gerund is a verb that’s been turned into a noun. 

What? Wait a minute. Back the truck up. 

Verbs—for the most part—are action words.1

      Swim. 

      Read. 

      Dance. 

Nouns name things, people, places, or ideas. When we take a verb (such as swim, read, or dance) and turn it into a thing, we’re turning the verb into a thing, a gerund:

      Swimming is fun. 

            (Swimming is a thing, a noun, so it’s a gerund.)   

      Reading is fundamental. Thank you, Lavar Burton.

            (Reading is a thing.) 

      Their dancing was creative and elegant. Thank you, Fred and Ginger.

            (Dancing is . . . well . . . you get the point.)   

What used to be verbs (action words) are now nouns (things). Notice how gerunds end in -ing. That’s standard. Sometimes with a double letter (swim into swimming). Sometimes with a dropped letter (dance into dancing).

Is this important? Will this be on the final exam? Probably not, but it’s interesting. 

Next week: dangling participles.  

______

1 Some verbs are “state-of-being” verbs. They’re “equal signs.” Is. Am. Are. Was. Were. So there are two kinds of verbs: action and state-of-being.