Syntax

Phrases

a phrase consists of 2 words, one of which is a main word and the other one is dependant. The dependant word answers the question you ask by usig the main word.
ex, красивая девочка.  кто?что? - девочка. девочка какая? - красивая
                                           (who?what? - girl. what kind of a girl? - beautiful) 

There are 3 types of the connection between the main and the dependant words.

1st  AGREEMENT. the dependant word agrees(in number, gender, case etc) with the main word.
ex., холодное утро.  "холодное" - singular, neutral, niminative case (accusative)
"холодное" agrees with the word "утро"

2nd type is GOVERNMENT. the dependant word is used in a special form depending on lexico-grammatical meaning of the main word.
ex, читать книгу. the word книга is used according to the case that the verb requires after itself - accusative case. читать кого?что? книгу.
3rd type is Adjunction. the dependant word does not change ( neither function words are used nor the morphological form changes) 
ex, петь красиво. the word красиво does not change though it is dependant in this phrase. 
что делать? петь. петь как? красиво

Exercise

define the type of the connection between the main and dependant words and explain why:

хорошее слово
говорить громко
ненависть к врагу
любимое дело
об интересном рассказе
недовольный работой
хорошая работа
смотреть молча
короткое слово

Word order in Russian sentences

In English, the word order plays an important role because it shows the relationships between parts in the sentence (subject, object, etc.). For example, if we say "Cats eat mice", we clearly understand that "cats" is here the subject of the action "eat" and the object of this action is "mice". If we switch the position of nouns "cats" and "mice", we get "Mice eat cats", a sentence with a different meaning. So, in English sentence the grammatical sense depends on word order.

But in Russian the word order is not so strict, as the grammatical meaning (number, gender, case) is expressed by prefixes, suffixes and endings. So, if we say the sentence above in Russian, then meaning will not change much:

Кошки едят мышек. Мышек едят кошки. Едят кошки мышек.

More information on word order in russian here

http://www.study-languages-online.com/russian-words-order.html