Building Sentence
Some
English sentences are very basic:
Shakespeare was a writer.
Einstein said something.
The Inuit are a people.
You could
write an entire essay using only simple sentences like these:
William Shakespeare was a writer. He
wrote plays. It was the Elizabethan age. One play was Hamlet. It was a tragedy.
Hamlet died. The court died too.
It is not
likely, however, that your essay would receive a passing grade. This chapter
helps you learn to recognise different types of sentences and to use them
effectively in your own writing.
A. 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 or 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 Montréal 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 sentence 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 emphasise balance and parallelism;
- a short simple sentence will grab a reader's attention;
- a loose sentence 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.
B.
The Structure of a Sentence
Remember
that every clause is, in a sense, a miniature sentence. A simple sentences
contains only a single clause, while a compound sentence, a complex sentence,
or a compound-complex sentence contains at least two clauses.
The Simple Sentence
The most
basic type of sentence is the simple sentence,
which contains only one clause. A simple sentence can be as short as one word:
Run!
Usually,
however, the sentence has a subject as well as a predicate and both the subject
and the predicate may have modifiers. All of the following are simple
sentences, because each contains only one clause:
Melt!
Ice melts.
The ice melts
quickly.
The ice on the river melts quickly under the warm March sun.
Lying exposed without its blanket of
snow, the ice on the river melts quickly
under the warm March sun.
As you can
see, a simple sentence can be quite long -- it is a mistake to think that you
can tell a simple sentence from a compound sentence or a complex sentence
simply by its length.
The most natural
sentence structure is the simple sentence: it is the first kind which children
learn to speak, and it remains by far the most common sentence in the spoken
language of people of all ages. In written work, simple sentences can be very
effective for grabbing a reader's attention or for summing up an argument, but
you have to use them with care: too many simple sentences can make your writing
seem childish.
When you
do use simple sentences, you should add transitional phrases to connect them to
the surrounding sentences.
1) The Compound Sentence
A compound sentence consists of two or more
independent clauses (or simple sentences) joined by co-ordinating conjunctions
like "and," "but," and "or":
Simple
Canada is a rich country.
Simple
Still, it has many poor people.
Compound
Canada is a rich country, but still it has many poor people.
Compound
sentences are very natural for English speakers -- small children learn to use
them early on to connect their ideas and to avoid pausing (and allowing an
adult to interrupt):
Today at school Mr. Moore brought in
his pet rabbit, and he showed it to the class, and I got to pet it, and Kate
held it, and we coloured pictures of it, and it ate part of my carrot at lunch,
and ...
Of course,
this is an extreme example, but if you over-use compound sentences in written
work, your writing might seem immature.
A compound
sentence is most effective when you use it to create a sense of balance or
contrast between two (or more) equally-important pieces of information:
Montéal has better clubs, but Toronto
has better cinemas.
Special Cases of Compound Sentences
There are
two special types of compound sentences which you might want to note. First,
rather than joining two simple sentences together, a co-ordinating conjunction
sometimes joins two complex sentences, or one simple sentence and one complex
sentence. In this case, the sentence is called a compound-complex
sentence:
compound-complex
The package arrived in the
morning,
but the
courier left before I could check the contents.
The second
special case involves punctuation. It is possible to join two originally
separate sentences into a compound sentence using a semicolon instead of a
co-ordinating conjunction:
Sir John A. Macdonald had
a serious drinking problem; when sober, however, he could be a formidable foe in the House
of Commons.
Usually, a
conjunctive adverb like "however" or "consequently" will
appear near the beginning of the second part, but it is not required:
The sun rises in the east; it sets
in the west.
2)
The Complex Sentence
A complex sentence contains one independent clause
and at least one dependent clause. Unlike a compound sentence, however, a
complex sentence contains clauses which are not equal. Consider the
following examples:
Simple
My friend invited me to a party. I
do not want to go.
Compound
My friend invited me to a party, but
I do not want to go.
Complex
Although my friend invited me to a
party, I do not want to go.
In the
first example, there are two separate simple sentences: "My friend invited
me to a party" and "I do not want to go." The second example
joins them together into a single sentence with the co-ordinating conjunction
"but," but both parts could still stand as independent sentences --
they are entirely equal, and the reader cannot tell which is most important. In
the third example, however, the sentence has changed quite a bit: the first
clause, "Although my friend invited me to a party," has become
incomplete, or a dependent clause.
A complex
sentence is very different from a simple sentence or a compound sentence
because it makes clear which ideas are most important. When you write
My friend invited me to a party. I
do not want to go.
or even
My friend invited me to a party, but
I do not want to go.
The reader
will have trouble knowing which piece of information is most important to you.
When you write the subordinating conjunction "although" at the
beginning of the first clause, however, you make it clear that the fact that
your friend invited you is less important than, or subordinate,
to the fact that you do not want to go.
C.
The Order of a Sentence
Not all
sentences make a single point -- compound sentences, especially, may present
several equally-important pieces of information -- but most of the time, when
you write a sentence, there is a single argument, statement, question, or
command which you wish to get across.
When you
are writing your sentences, do not bury your main point in the middle; instead,
use one of the positions of emphasis at
the beginning or end of the sentence.
The Loose Sentence
If you put
your main point at the beginning of a long sentence, you are writing a loose sentence:
loose
I am willing to pay
slightly higher taxes for the privilege of living in Canada, considering the free health care,
the cheap tuition fees, the low crime rate, the comprehensive social programs,
and the wonderful winters.
The main
point of this sentence is that the writer prefers to live in Canada, and the
writer makes the point at the very beginning: everything which follows is
simply extra information. When the readers read about the free health care, the
cheap tuition fees, the low crime rate, the comprehensive social programs, and
the wonderful winters, they will already know that these are reasons for living
in Canada, and as a result, they will be more likely to understand the sentence
on a first reading.
Loose
sentences are the most natural for English speakers, who almost always talk in
loose sentences: even the most sophisticated English writers tend to use loose
sentences much more often than periodic sentences. While a periodic sentence
can be useful for making an important point or for a special dramatic effect,
it is also much more difficult to read, and often requires readers to go back
and reread the sentence once they understand the main point.
Finally,
it is important to remember that you have to structure a loose sentence as
carefully as you would structure a periodic sentence: it is very easy to lose
control of a loose sentence so that by the end the reader has forgotten what
your main point was.
D.
The Periodic Sentence
If your
main point is at the end of a long sentence, you are writing a periodic sentence:
periodic
Considering the free health care,
the cheap tuition fees, the low crime rate, the comprehensive social programs,
and the wonderful winters, I am willing to pay
slightly higher taxes for the privilege of living in Canada.
The main
point of this sentence is that the writer prefers to live in Canada. At the
beginning of this sentence, the reader does not know what point the writer is
going to make: what about the free health care, cheap tuition fees, low crime
rate, comprehensive social programs, and wonderful winters? The reader has to
read all of this information without knowing what the conclusion will
be.
The
periodic sentence has become much rarer in formal English writing over the past
hundred years, and it has never been common in informal spoken English (outside
of bad political speeches). Still, it is a powerful rhetorical tool. An
occasional periodic sentence is not only dramatic but persuasive: even if the
readers do not agree with your conclusion, they will read your evidence first
with open minds. If you use a loose sentence with hostile readers, the readers
will probably close their minds before considering any of your evidence.
Finally,
it is important to remember that periodic sentences are like exclamatory
sentences: used once or twice in a piece of writing, they can be very
effective; used any more than that, they can make you sound dull and pompous.
E.
The Purpose of a Sentence
The other
classifications in this chapter describe how you construct your
sentences, but this last set describes why you have written the
sentences in the first place. Most sentences which you write should simply
state facts, conjectures, or arguments, but sometimes you will want to give
commands or ask questions.
1) The Declarative
Sentence
The declarative sentence is the most important type.
You can, and often will write entire essays or reports using only
declarative sentences, and you should always use them far more often than any
other type. A declarative sentence simply states a fact or argument, without
requiring either an answer or action from the reader. You punctuate your
declarative sentences with a simple period:
Ottawa is the capital of Canada.
The distinction between
deconstruction and post-modernism eludes me.
He asked which path leads back to
the lodge.
Note that
the last example contains an indirect question,
"which path leads back to the lodge." An indirect question does not
make a sentence into an interrogative sentence -- only a direct question can do
that.
2) The Interrogative Sentence
An interrogative sentence
asks a direct question and always ends in a question mark:
Who can read this and not be moved?
How many roads must a man walk down?
Does money grow on trees?
Note that
an indirect question does not make a sentence interrogative:
Direct/Interrogative
When was Lester Pearson prime
minister?
Indirect/Declarative
I wonder when Lester Pearson was
prime minister.
A direct
question requires an answer from the reader, while an indirect question does
not.
3) The Rhetorical Question
Normally,
an essay or report will not contain many regular direct questions, since you
are writing it to present information or to make an argument. There is,
however, a special type of direct question called a rhetorical
question -- that is, a question which you do not actually expect the
reader to answer:
Why did the War of 1812 take place?
Some scholars argue that it was simply a land-grab by the Americans ...
If you do
not overuse them, rhetorical questions can be a very effective way to introduce
new topics or problems in the course of a paper; if you use them too often,
however, you may sound patronising and/or too much like a professor giving a
mediocre lecture.
4)
The Exclamatory Sentence
An exclamatory sentence, or exclamation, is simply a more forceful version of
a declarative sentence, marked at the end with an exclamation mark:
The butler did it!
How beautiful this river is!
Some towns in Upper Canada lost up
to a third of their population during the cholera epidemics of the early
nineteenth century!
Exclamatory
sentences are common in speech and (sometimes) in fiction, but over the last
200 years they have almost entirely disappeared from academic writing. You will
(or should) probably never use one in any sort of academic writing, except
where you are quoting something else directly. Note that an exclamation mark
can also appear at the end of an imperative sentence.
5)
The Imperative Sentence
An imperative sentence gives a direct command to
someone -- this type of sentence can end either with a period or with an
exclamation mark, depending on how forceful the command is:
Sit!
Read this book for tomorrow.
You should
not usually use an exclamation mark with the word "please":
Wash the windows!
Please wash the windows.
Normally,
you should not use imperative sentences in academic writing. When you do use an
imperative sentence, it should usually contain only a mild command, and thus,
end with a period:
Consider the Incas.
