Lesson 11: Emphasis

Hi, friends! This lesson is about the emphasis. It is used to give an especial importance or attention to something. There are different ways to express emphasis:

INVERSION: it means changing the order of the sentence. In this case, the change is to put the verb before the subject. It is a literary technique for emphasis. For example:

• I have never seen such a wonderful landscape. 
• Never have I seen such a wonderful landscape. 

 In the last sentence, inversion is used to emphasise the fact that in your whole lifetime you have not seen such a wonderful landscape.
There are several types of inversion, but this subject will be explained by my partner in the next lesson.


AUXILIARY VERB DO: It is used in affirmative sentences to express emphasis. For example:

CLEFT SENTENCES: it-clefts change the normal sentence pattern to emphasise a particular piece of information. The emphasis in the resulting cleft sentence is on the phrase after it + be. For example:

REPETITION: you can get your reader’s attention by repeating words (adjectives and adverbs) within the sentence. For example:

• The room was very, very large.
• It was a massively large room.

POSITION OF WORDS: by placing an introductory word at the beginning of a sentence, the writer makes the reader pay attention to that word to be alerted for the rest of the sentence.

• The farmer wearily pushed the wheelbarrow.
• Wearily, the farmer pushed the wheelbarrow.

PASIVE VOICE: It is used to emphasize the person or thing acted on. For example, it may be your main topic: