Sentence Structure

What’s a sentence?

• Here are two sentences:

– He smiles.

– You will read and discuss three readings in each chapter before you begin to write.

Length does not determine what is and is not a sentence. Regardless of how long or short a group of words is, it needs two parts to be a sentence: a subject and a predicate.

•The subject tells us who or what.

•The predicate tells us what about it.

Who or what? What about it?

He smiles.

You will read and discuss three readings in each chapter before you begin to write.

These two parts connect to form a basic sentence, also known as an independent clause.

Another way to describe a sentence is to compare it to a bike…

These two parts connect to form a stable structure.

The subject is one wheel;

the predicate is the other wheel.

We can have just one word in each wheel…

Students studied.

Children play.

Finding the “S” and “P”

• Fish swim in the ocean.

• Birds fly in the sky.

• We study English.

• You need to read a lot.

But most of the time our ideas include more details. We add extra words to the wheels.

Students in the biology lab studied cells under an electron microscope.

The neighborhood children play basketball at the community center.

Old magazines are stacked under the kitchen table.

The weekend seminar explains how to start a small business.

Meditation helps create a peaceful mind and healthy body.

We can expand the wheels by adding adjectives:

We can expand the wheels by adding adverbs:

Airline employees worked diligently to reschedule our flights.

We carefully loaded the van with furniture.

The driver realized immediately that he had missed the exit.

We can also add prepositional phrases:

The windows rattled in the winter storm.

We loaded our hamburgers with ketchup, mustard, and onion.

Some car dealers make most of their profit on parts and services.

Regardless of how much detail we add, the wheels give the same kind of information. The subject tells us who or what. The predicate tells us what about it.

Who or what? What about it?

Randy loves pizza.

Companies benefit from customer loyalty.

Efficient train service will decrease traffic congestion.

Can fish fly?

The flying fish doesn’t really fly.

Like a glider, the flying fish soars through the air.

Ducks swim in lakes and ponds.

Do ducks fly south for the winter?

Compound Subjects & Predicates

• A sentence may have more than one subject or more than one predicate.

• My sister and her friend went to a movie.

• They ate popcorn and drank soda.

• Tracy moved to Arizona.

• Tracy’s grandmother lives there.

• Tracy wrote us a letter.

• Tracy goes swimming everyday.

Fragments

• If one of the wheels is missing, it is not a sentence.

• Lives at the zoo.

• The animals in that cage.

• Roaming around.

• Franklin Roosevelt president from 1933 to 1945.

• Was elected four times.

• A lot of other things, too.

• Once, he and his friends sailed to an island.

• Went there to find buried treasure.

• Didn’t find any treasure.

• Roosevelt something else, though.

• Found a nest with four baby birds in it.

• He became an avid bird-watcher.

• Enjoyed swimming and sailing with his children.

• Roosevelt one daughter and five sons.

Run-on Sentences

• Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens “Mark Twain” was his pen name.

• You can fix this error by adding end punctuation and a capital letter to split the run-on sentence into two sentences.

FANBOYS

• Grandma Moses lived to be 101 years old she was a centenarian.

• Grandma Moses lived to be 101 years old, so she was a centenarian.

Run-on Sentences

• Anna Moses was a famous artist she didn’t begin painting until she was 78 years old.

• She enjoyed painting scenes near her farm in New York she often gave away her paintings.

• One day an art collector saw her paintings in a store window he liked them very much.

• He went to her home and bought every painting she had 15 of them!

• Her style of painting was called American Primitive she became famous even in Europe.