Hello, Sentence Dancers!
As a professor of liberal arts who teaches English 101/102 and Writing, and the author of over 60 books and articles, I am often asked how to make one's writing more interesting. One first-year college secret is to use differing sentence structure. But first, it is important to understand the difference between a clause and a sentence. A clause is a group of words with a subject and a verb. A sentence is a group of words (1) with a subject, and (2) a verb, that (3) begins with a capital letter, (4) ends with terminal punctuation (a period, exclamation point or question mark), and (5) has meaning. Another way of saying this is a sentence consists of at least one clause, begins with a capital letter, ends with terminal punctuation and has meaning.
There are two kinds of clauses, Santa and Mrs. Santa (a joke). There are, indeed, two kinds of clauses, but they are actually called (1) independent, coordinate or "main" (these clauses can "stand alone" in meaning), and (2) dependent or subordinate (these clauses depend on one or more other independent clauses to have a clear meaning).
Sentences can be:
SIMPLE (a sentence with only one independent clause and no dependent clauses)
COMPOUND (a sentence with two or more independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunctions -- like and, or, but so, for -- that has no dependent clauses)
COMPLEX (a sentence with only one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses joined by subordinating conjunctions -- like when, that, which, who)
COMPOUND/COMPLEX for COMPLEX/COMPOUND (a sentence with two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses including their respective coordinating and subordinating conjunctions).
I send American college students to
Purdue University's OWL (Online Writing Laboratory) for more information on sentence, clause, and phrase structure. For a quick review and fun "test" go to
http://www.eslbee.com/sentences.htm.
Goodbye for now from the Sentence Dancer,
Dan
