Creating negative sentence in Simple Present Tense

Since there are two kinds of sentence, nominal and verbal, students usually confuse when they want to construct the negative sentence in Simple Present Tense. In this posting, EEL will give a simple explanation to help students creating negative sentence.

1. Students have to remember that they have to add ‘not’ after the predicate to construct a negative sentence.

2. The negative marker, ‘not’, can be placed after a predicate which is included as ‘be’, such as is, am, and are. For example:

Positive Sentences:

• I am a teacher.
• He is happy.
• They are sad.

Negative sentence:

• I am not a teacher.
• He is not a happy.
• They are not sad.

3. The negative marker ‘not’ cannot be placed after a predicate which is a verb. As a result, you have to place ‘not’ after the auxiliary verb ‘do’. For example:

Positive Sentences:

• They cook the noodles.
• We sing a song.
• He speaks English

Negative sentence:

• They do not cook the noodles.
• We do not sing a song.
• He does* not speak English.

*'Do' changes into 'does' when it is used in a sentence which employs singular subject. Remember that in a simple present tense, the sentences which are using the singular subject must be followed by verb 1 + suffix s/es. Another example:

Positive sentence:

• He makes a toy.
• My father plays the guitar.

Negative Sentence:

• He does not make a toy.
• My father does not play the guitar.