Compliment (n) and Complement (n)

These five worksheets on the homophones compliment and complement are actually the first I ever wrote. You’ll notice that I set up the worksheets to use these words as nouns. Because it turns up as a term of art in any number of grammar and style manuals, I wanted students to learn the use of complement as a grammatical term. It’s used in all kinds of ways, even sometimes to describe a predicate, which I think is better called, simply, a predicate.

However, as a means of describing both the direct objects and the indirect objects of verbs, I think this is a very good word indeed. I’m fairly certain I placed all five of these worksheets as do-now exercises at various places in a thirteen-lesson unit on verbs. If you use them the same way, you may want to mention to students that both of these words can be used as verbs; both are used transitively.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.