The Structure of a Sentence
"The good writer uses different types of sentences in different situations"
Why Sentences 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 playwrite 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.
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 havemodifiers. 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.
Written by David Megginson, University of Ottawa-Canada’s university, Available:
สร้าง: 15 ธันวาคม 2552 14:28 · แก้ไข: 15 ธันวาคม 2552 14:36
