I learned most of what I know about English grammar and style in 9th Grade, when I was fourteen years old. My English teacher at Chanel High School was the Rev. Gerard Hageman, S.M. In the first week of classes, he handed out a single-sided mimeographed sheet on yellow paper entitled “Random Rules of Grammar and Style.”

Thereafter, in the frequent themes we wrote for class, there were only two possible grades: 100% or 0%, the latter if we violated any of the rules on the infamous yellow sheet. Since at our high school, all grades were stated as percentages, any mistakes were disastrous to our grade point average. That first semester, I got an 89%—and that was the high grade in our class.

In this blog post, I discuss the first five lines on the yellow sheet, which opened with a strange line that went:

D SAPS DT C CINQ MOC

The line was a mnemonic of sorts. The letters stood for Direct Address (D), Salutation (S), Appositives (A), Parentheticals (P), Series (S), Dates (D), Titles After Names (T), Compound Sentences (C), Contrasting Ideas (C), Introductory Adverbial Clauses (I), Non-Restrictives (N), Direct Quotations (Q), Mild Interjections (M), Omitted Words (O), and Common Sense (C). Late in the game, Father Hageman also included City and State, but it didn’t fit the mnemonic. Maybe that’s why he put it in parentheses.

An appositive is a noun, pronoun, or phrase placed next to another noun, pronoun, or phrase to rename, identify, or explain it. For example: Jack, a real chess whiz, beat me in three moves.

A parenthetical is very much like an appositive. The same example above applies.

Here is an example of an introductory adverbial clause: As expected, Tyler won the race handily.

As for non-restrictives, that refers to clauses which give additional information that is not vital to one’sunderstanding of the sentences. For example: Cleveland, which is situated on the shores of Lake Erie, used to be the seventh largest city in the country.