This week we continue our focus on the sentence – the basic building block of a text. A text, whether it be a story, an essay, a report or a journal entry, is made up of a number of sentences. Sentences can consist of a single clause – a basic unit of meaning that expresses a message – or a number of clauses joined together. Students need to know how to combine clauses to make sentences and how to construct different types of relationships between clauses in a sentence. 

One way to describe a sentence is as a ‘chunk’ of writing. We organise our writing into chunks of writing because this makes it easier to understand. Good readers read chunks rather than individual words, and we speak in chunks rather than in single words. Sentences express a complete meaning, not part of a meaning. Again, good readers would immediately be able to tell which of the following is a complete sentence:

David kicked
David kicked a
David kicked a football. 

Sentences have a subject and a predicate. The subject describes who or what did the action, and always contains a noun or a pronoun. The predicate tells what action was performed. 

In the sentence above, ‘David’ is the subject, and ‘kicked a football’ is the predicate. In this example we can further divide the predicate into the verb ‘kicked’ and its object ‘a football’. An object always contains a noun or a pronoun. 

The words that make up a sentence are categorised into parts of speech according to their function or role. They are nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions and articles. We will look closely at these next week. 

An important skill that students need to develop is how to create well-structured sentences. Students’ writing often sounds awkward because of the overuse of simple, single-clause sentences or because of long, rambling, incoherent sentences. 

Simple sentences are quite appropriate – and indeed functional – if used strategically. For example, in texts such as reports, they are typically short, uncluttered and ‘to the point’. They are also effective when used at particular stages in a narrative – to disrupt the rhythm, to introduce a staccato effect or to make a significant point. 

Longer sentences are appropriate, on the other hand, when there are a number of closely related ideas that need to be brought together. As these sentences generally require careful crafting, students need to be aware of the various ways in which information can be presented and clauses can be combined. 

Common errors of usage in students’ writing concern the following:

• Run-on or freight-train sentences: a sentence in which two or more main clauses are joined by commas instead of being separated by a full stop or joined by a conjunction. 

It was getting late, we went home. (incorrect)
It was getting late. We went home. (correct)
It was getting late, so we went home. (correct)

• Sentence fragments: a frequent error is to use a dependent clause with no independent clause. 

There were lots of animals. Such as kangaroos, koalas and rabbits. (incorrect)
There were lots of animals such as kangaroos, koalas and rabbits. (correct)
There were lots of animals. These included kangaroos, koalas and rabbits. (correct)

• Non-agreement: The subject in a sentence must ‘agree’ in number and in person with the verb to which it is attached. 

Alisa and Nathan was the first to arrive at the airport. (incorrect)
Alisa and Nathan were the first to arrive at the airport. (correct)

The following piece of creative writing was composed by Eamon Magro, a member of Mrs Gramelis’ Year 7 English class. The prompts for the writing were C. S. Lewis’ comment ‘We read to know we are not alone’ and Stephen King’s ‘Books are a uniquely portable magic’. Eamon and I discussed the value of reading the work out loud and hearing where changes need to be made. The subsequent editing of Eamon’s writing involved chopping up freight-train sentences and varying their length. The use of effective repetition was noted as well as the inclusion of key words from the prompts. 

I was all alone in my house, lost in a labyrinth of thought. No voices could be made out and no sound echoed through the empty building. It was just me. I sat there for hours, looking out onto the yard. I heard a voice coming from the old bookshelf, buried beneath thirty years of dust. And, with the rhythm of a beating drum, I watched as an old leather-bound book slammed against the wall. I picked it up, blowing the dust off in a thick sheet. Cautiously, I opened it. 

A torrent of bright light surged out of the book, piercing all shadows. The room, warped and contorted, dissolved around me. I awoke in a brightly lit room with bookshelves going from the sleek marble floor to the ceiling, hundreds of feet above. I picked up a book from the shelf. It radiated with what I could only describe as a kind of magic. A magic I would remember for the rest of my life. 

Mrs Clare Murphy
English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach