Students easily remember that NOT is written separately with gerunds, just like with the verb from which this part of speech originated:
Having not learned to distinguish between parts of speech, students get confused in the application of spelling rules. Therefore, it is impossible to become a truly literate person without knowing the basics of morphology
The exception to this rule is when the word without this particle is no longer used:
Kirillov, hating a strange city in which no one was dear, was constantly silent. The inhabitants of the house, disliking the gloomy neighbor, shunned him. Only one perspicacious Anna Sergeevna, indignant at the stupidity of the townsfolk, saw in the visitor a good, but very unhappy person
It should also be remembered that the prefix NEDO- is an indicator of continuous spelling:
Father, sleep deprived, worked daily on his science project. But he made the real discovery by simply overlooking the children who accidentally spilled reagents on the table
The insidiousness of the easy, at first glance, spelling "Spelling NOT with gerunds" is the presence of homonymous forms. Words that sound the same in Russian have different lexical meanings.
For example, the participles "undernourished" and "not enough" are spelled differently.
Compare:
- Maria, always without eating (does not finish) her breakfast, goes to work first.
- During the war, people lived undernourished (ate little, malnourished) for months.
Being categorically separate spelling NOT with gerunds, many people forget about derivative prepositions and adverbs.
The gerunds that are indistinguishable from each other and the parts of speech formed from them are the biggest problem for schoolchildren studying the topic “NOT with gerunds.”
Examples of difficult spellings:
- Despite (general) mother's eyes, Andrey told about his secret.
- Despite (derived preposition) his excitement, the speaker spoke with dignity.
- Without a moment's delay (general participle) we set off for Moscow.
- Get out of the room at once (adverb)!
In order not to make a mistake, you need to know the grammatical signs of these parts of speech and correctly ask a question to the word of interest. If we have a gerund, then you can ask questions ("what are you doing?" and "what are you doing?").
Besides, this part of speech can easily be turned into the verb from which it was formed. This will not change the meaning of the sentence.
Derived prepositions have no independent meaning. Their role is reduced to expressing the syntactic dependence of nominal parts of speech on other words. The preposition, therefore, will remain in both the question and the answer:
Despite the (what?) difficulties, we did a decent job
An adverb most often refers to a verb, as it denotes a sign of action.
By the way, you should pay attention to the word "reluctantly". This adverb, which has lost touch with its ancestor that disappeared from the language - the gerund " although", is always written together:
Having stayed up late, the guests (how?) reluctantly began to disperse
Fortunately, there are not so many words in modern Russian that can be mistaken for confusing them with gerunds. Having memorized several homonymous pairs of words, students quickly learn the spelling “NOT with gerunds.”
