October 2026 HESI A2 Grammar Study Guide

Parts of speech Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions. You need them mainly because other rules depend on them: agreement, modifier placement and pronoun reference are all stated in these terms. Read the full guide Punctuation Commas, semicolons, colons and apostrophes, tested where they change meaning rather than where they are decorative. A comma before a conjunction joining two complete sentences, and an apostrophe distinguishing possession from a contraction, are the two that appear most. Read the full guide Plural spelling Regular plurals and the irregular ones that fill medical vocabulary: nucleus becomes nuclei, diagnosis becomes diagnoses, bacterium becomes bacteria, vertebra becomes vertebrae. Read the full guide Compound and simple sentences A simple sentence has one independent clause; a compound sentence joins two with a conjunction or a semicolon. Recognising which you have determines whether a comma is required, optional or wrong. Read the full guide Sentence rearrangement Putting scrambled sentences into a coherent order. The logic is carried by transitions and by pronouns, since a pronoun cannot appear before the noun it refers to. Read the full guide Dangling modifiers A descriptive phrase that appears to modify the wrong thing, usually because the intended subject is missing. "Walking into the room, the monitor was alarming" has the monitor doing the walking. Read the full guide Coherence in writing Whether a passage holds together: consistent tense, logical order, and transitions that match the relationship between ideas. Questions ask you to spot the sentence that breaks the flow or the connector that contradicts it. Read the full guide