What is a sentence? Nouns & Pronouns/Verbs

In the blog before the last one, we talked about the structure of paragraphs in "academic writing." We discussed how you use each paragraph to develop your idea in the four or five sentence paragraph. In this blog, we're going to look at basics - the sentences you use in your paragraphs. It makes sense that if you can't write a good sentence, you're going to have trouble writing paragraphs.

Sentence Structure
In academic writing, a sentence must have a subject and a main verb. This subject can be a noun or pronoun. Moreover, each sentence begins with a capital and ends with a full stop(period), question or exclamation mark. A noun or pronoun (the subject) is a word that names a thing such as: tree, house, boy, apple or road or a concept such as happiness, luck, or love. A pronoun, he, she, I, you, we, or they can be used to substitute the subject in the place of nouns. For example:
Sentence 1 - John went to the store with Joe.
Sentence 2 - He went to the store with him.
In sentence 2, he replaces John and him replaces Joe.

Different forms of pronouns replace nouns, depending on whether they are at the beginning of the sentence (subjective case) before the verb or whether they are after the verb at the end of the sentence (objective case). The table below demonstrates the correct use of the pronoun in the subjective and objective forms.

Person Subjective Objective
First person singular I/me
Examples: I went to the store. He gave the pencil to me.

Second person singular you/you
Examples: You went to the store. He gave the pencil to you.

Third person singular he/she; him/her
Examples: He/she went to the store. He gave the pencil to him/her.

First person plural we/us
Examples: We went to the store He gave the pencils to us.

Second person plural you/you
Examples: You went to the store. He gave the pencils to you.

Third person plural they/them
They went to the store. He gave the pencils to them.

I will briefly touch on verbs here. I will discuss of verbs active and passive verbs in our next post as well as active sentences. However, for the purposes this discussion, a verb is a word that denotes an action. Every sentence must have a verb.
Example - Jane carried (note: the verb is to carry) the cake home from the store.
For a more involved discussion on verb agreement and tenses, please go to Purdue University's OWL resource at:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/
Some students may wish to spend some time here perusing special problems related to verbs. Conversely, you may also email me for special resources that I will be happy to suggest.

Sentence Structures
Simple Sentences
Simple sentences such as:
Example 1 - John kicked the ball between the goal posts. Example 2 - Without wine, life would be unbearable.
are composed of one independent clause. A clause is a part of the sentence that has a subject (a main noun) and a predicate (a main verb). In the above sentence, the whole sentence is one independent clause, in other words it "stands alone" (Hacker, 376). This is true of any independent clause.

Compound Sentences
These sentences are composed of two or more independent clauses with no subordinate clauses. These clauses are usually joined by a word such as: and, or, but, nor, for so, yet or maybe joined by a semi colon.
Example 1 - You can redo your assignment but you still need to understand the underlying problems to fix it.
Example 2 - All assignments are improved with a grammar text in one hand and an Oxford Dictionary in the other.
Example 3 - Spock could not save the survivors from Vulcan and save his mother at the same time.
Example 4 - Master grammar first; this will help you complete your assignments for the MBA programme.

The bolded words in the three sentences, but and and, allow the writer to join two separate independent clauses to make one sentence. This allows the writer to juxtapose two ideas of equal value. The sentence in the fourth example above has done just this with two complete sentences, each with their own subject and verb. Instead of placing a full stop between them, the semi colon signals that these ideas are closely related but are in two complete sentences. This is a substitute for using the word and between these sentences. It creates variety in your sentences and maintains reader interest, especially if you have a tendency to overuse the word and.

Note: The clause in the second half of each example is independent because these sentences could each stand alone as separate sentences. They do not require the joining word to indicate a relationship between the two ideas to make them complete.

Complex sentences/Sometimes called Compound/Complex Sentences
A complex sentence has at least one main clause and at least one subordinate clause.
A subordinate clause contains a predicate (a verb) and a subject (a noun), but it "functions in the sentence as an adjective, adverb, or a noun; it cannot stand alone (Hacker, 376)." So, the clause cannot be a separate sentence as in the examples above.

Example 1 - Your assignments show steady signs of improvement, an optimistic development.
Example 2 - Although I used to work for Apple I have worked for Microsoft as a programmer since 2007.
Example 3 - When Jim Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise, he learned the names of every crewman.

The subordinate clauses above in bold cannot stand on their own as independent sentences, they are tied to the idea in the main clause. For example, in the third sentence, the clause "When Jim Kirk became the Captain of the Enterprise" is clearly tied to his actions in the main body of the sentence, he learned the names of every crewman. It is subordinate in fact to the main idea that he learned the names of every crewman.

I have also inverted the word order in some of these sentences. This, like the sentence with semi colon under the compound sentences, creates variety for the reader. When you use a variety of simple, compound and complex sentences in your assignments, they improve. Readers, whether they are reading exams or assignments, wake up when they encounter an exam or an assignment that has a variety of sentences. In writing sentences, take the advice of Fowler (see The King's English) and make your sentences clear and concise. Use precise words. First, however make sure each sentence is complete with a main verb and main subject.

Let's be clear here, clauses - whether they are independent or subordinate - are only important so we can make sure that our writing is clear. Grammar without writing is an empty pursuit. An example of this is, that when I was in grade school, I'd spend hours parsing sentences for no apparent reason. I still had to learn grammar later. I want to spare you this problem.

Steven King, the writer, taught grammar at a college before he wrote horror novels. A large part of his success lies in his understanding of the gerund. He has actually said this in his book on creative writing. Read Harry Potter and you will see that Rowling knows her grammar. There are writers, and I've read some of their work, whose grammar is shaky but I imagine their editors go on red alert when they turn their manuscripts in. You don't have a staff of editors to fix your work, and increasingly in the real world, people have less time for people who can't present an idea clearly in as few words as possible.

However, assignments and exams arrive on tutors' desks every day without a main subject/noun or a main verb. Many students believe this is a sentence: Flying down to Rio. Flying is a participle, not a verb. Down is not a verb either, it is a preposition. We will discuss this later, just believe me for now. The rest of you who have been reading this post will quickly realize that there is no main subject in this sentence either. Rules can be broken in creative writing but I believe you need to understand them to know why you are breaking them, even in dialogue. Language is not subjective and arbitrary. Words have meaning; language has structure. So, even if you can't remember which clause is called independent and which is called subordinate, if you have a main idea and main verb, you have a complete sentence. For problems such as subject/verb agreement, I refer you to the many excellent resources I have cited in this post and future discussions of these problems.

For a comprehensive discussion of sentences and how to improve them, I recommend How to Write Better English by Robert Allen (Penguin Books, 2005) which has helped me immeasurably in writing this post. I also recommend Diana Hacker's A Canadian Writer's Reference (Nelson, 2001). For those of you who are interested in my reference to the gerund above, Steven King's book is called "On Writing". It is about creative writing. OWL also discusses the gerund in detail, for those who are interested. (See website above)