Base Sentence: George W. Bush Gave a Speech

The Appositive

The appositive, everybody’s favorite “helpful hint” phrase, can be used to provide an easygoing explanation to some unfamiliar term. When writers want to make sure their readers, people whose interest they do not want to lose, are following along comfortably, they often use appositives.

Appositive: a phrase used to provide additional information, explanation, or an alternate image to a noun or pronoun used in a base sentence. Note: an appositive is a noun phrase. That means it is a phrase containing (and based upon) a noun or pronoun. Strict appositives never contain verbs.

Base Sentence: George W. Bush gave a speech.

With appositive: George W. Bush, the current resident of the White House, gave a speech.

Appositives explain nouns, words for people, places, or things. They also explain pronouns, generalized “replacement” words for nouns like “it”, “they”, “she”, “we”, and “you”. But they, the appositives, do it in such a friendly unobtrusive way that some readers might not even notice.

Get your pencil, a sharpened one, and start underlining all the appositives from now on.

Imagine you have a friend, a guy without much sense. Imagine him at a celebration attended by a collection of wild, large, and dangerous individuals, a very rough party. Imagine him starting to get a bit too friendly with a young woman, the girlfriend of one of the most wild, large, and dangerous individuals, Death Rattle Dan. If you wanted to give him, your friend, a subtle hint that his behavior might not be too life preserving, you might say something like, “Gee Jim, I see you met Insatia, Death Rattle Dan’s girlfriend!” If he, your friend, were smart he would understand the hint right away . . .

Lots of GED texts, readings in the practice books and the test itself, use appositives. It’s one way they, the GED folks, make sure that MOST of the answers to the GED are IN the GED test itself.

Appositives, those nifty explanatory phrases, work great in essay style writing. They work well in other types of writing too, fiction being one example. In fiction, a more literary form of writing, appositives can be used to create an alternate image of a character or an object in a scene.

Notice how appositives, the phrases set off by commas, in the above sentences are punctuated. They, the appositives, are surrounded by commas. This, the comma use, is the usual practice. Commas, those periods with little tails, can sometimes be omitted if sentence could not be understood without the appositive. An appositive, the focus of this article, is like every other parenthetical phrase: it should be set off with commas if the sentence would work just as well without it, the appositive.

Did you find a sentence with two appositives?

Can using too many appositives be annoying?

How would you SAY an appositive when speaking out loud? Would you use pauses? Would you give the appositive a different inflection or tone?

Can you imagine a character in a Monte Python or Saturday Night Live sketch called “Mr. Appositive”?

Practice with appositives

Add appositives to the following sentences. The first three provide examples of appositives and comma use.

Bill Clinton just published his autobiography.

Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, just wrote his autobiography.

Plato was a student of Socrates.

Plato, one of Athens most famous aristocrats, was a student of Socrates, a commoner.

Aristotle was one of Plato’s students.

Aristotle, the first scientist ever published, was one of Plato’s students.

Osama Bin Ladin is blamed for financing the 9/11 attacks.

I have a DVD of my favorite movie.

I’d pay a dollar to download my favorite song.

Hamlet is my teacher’s favorite work of art.

The object he lost was worth thousands of dollars.

Good writing is based on rewriting.

The appositive is my favorite parenthetical phrase.

Revision should be done in stages.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_appos.html