Page 14 - DENG201_ENGLISH_II

English - II

Notes
Why Sentence Structure Matters
Although ordinary conversation, personal letters, and even some types of professional writing
(such as newspaper stories) consist almost entirely of simple sentences, your university of
college instructors will expect you to be able to use all types of sentences in your formal academic
writing. Writers who use only simple sentences are like truck drivers who do not know how to
shift out of first gear: they would be able to drive a load from Montreal to Calgary (eventually),
but they would have a great deal of trouble getting there.
If you use phrases and clauses carefully, your sentences will become much more interesting
and your ideas, much clearer. This complex sentences develops a major, central idea and provides
structured background information:
Since it involves the death not only of the title character but of the entire royal court, Hamlet is
the most extreme of the tragedies written by the Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare.
Just as a good driver uses different gears, a good writer uses different types of sentences in
different situations:
• a long complex sentence will show what information depends on what other information;
• a compound sentence will emphasis balance and parallelism;
• a short simple sentence will grab a reader’s attention;
• a loose sentences will tell the reader in advance how to interpret your information;
• a periodic sentence will leave the reader in suspense until the very end;
• a declarative sentence will avoid any special emotional impact;
• an exclamatory sentence, used sparingly, will jolt the reader;
• an interrogative sentence will force the reader to think about what you are writing; and
• an imperative sentence will make it clear that you want the reader to act right away.

1.3.1 Simple Sentences
A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, contains a subject and a verb, and it expresses
a complete thought. In the following simple sentences, subjects are in yellow, and verbs are in green.
1. Some students like to study in the mornings.
2. Juan and Arturo play football every afternoon.
3. Alicia goes to the library and studies every day.
The three examples above are all simple sentences. Not that sentence B contains a compound subject,
and sentence C contains a compound verb. Simple sentences, therefore, contain a subject and verb
and express a complete thought, but they can also contain a compound subjects or verbs.
Some more examples:
1. I enjoy playing tennis with my friends every weekend.
2. I enjoy playing tennis and look forward to it every weekend.
3. My friends and I play tennis and go bowling every weekend.
Notice that the second sentence has two verbs, enjoy and look forward to. This is called a compound
verb. Because there is only one clause, this is a simple sentence. The third sentence has a compound
subject as well as a compound verb, but it is still a simple sentence because it has only one clause.
Self-Assessment
5. (i) Write two simple sentences with one subject and one verb.
(ii) Write two simple sentences with one subject and two verbs.
(iii) Write two simple sentences with two subjects and two verbs.

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