Achieving Sentence Variety Part 1

In today's lesson, you'll begin part one of the three-part lesson about how to achieve sentence variety in your writing.

Why is showing variety in sentence structure and grammar important? Well.. If you look at four basic criteria on which your essay is evaluated, one criterion is called 'English language'.

To achieve a higher score or a perfect 5 out of 5 on the TOEFL English language criterion, you must show that you can accurately and flexibly use a variety of structures. This means you should not use the same simple sentence structures over and over again.

Do not be alarmed if you're not sure how to do that because in this lesson we will show you 3 strategies that you can use to vary your sentence structures. Let's get started!

OK! The three strategies are:

We will focus on the first strategy today, using a mix of four different sentence types, and cover the second strategy in another lesson.

Do you remember what the four types of sentences are? Well...let's take another look at them.

The four types of sentences are:

I will walk you through each sentence type one by one in this lesson.

A simple sentence has only one clause, called a main clause or an independent clause. It expresses the complete idea. Here are some examples:

As you can tell, each of them is a simple sentence expressing a complete idea, and each has a subject and a verb. The form of the subject appears differently. Take the last sentence, for example, the subject is 'Practicing sports'.

If you want to write a concise topic sentence for the body paragraph, you can use the simple sentence. Here is an example simple sentence on the topic of a body paragraph:

"Practicing sports can help children's physical development.".

Alright! So a simple sentence is an independent clause, right?. So what happens when we have two independent sentences and they have a relationship with each other? Well...when this happens, we need to connect them.

So how do we connect two independent clauses? There are two ways to achieve this

1. Use the coordinating conjunctions such as "and", "but", "or", "so", "yet", "for", "nor".
2. Use the conjunctive adverb (transition word) such as 'in addition', 'consequently', 'however'..etc

Using the first way, the sentence structure become a compound sentence. Look at these two independent sentences

How do we connect them? Here you can connect them using the coordinating conjunction "and". Here is the answer:

Notice the comma before "so".

Okay! Let's look at more examples so you can get a better idea of what a compound sentence is

Okay! The second way is using the conjunctive adverbs(transition words) such as 'As a result', 'Therefore', 'In addition' ..etc. Let's look at some examples. Here are two independent sentences.

Here, to connect them, you can use the transition word 'As a result'. Here is how you can write it

Pay attention to the "period" before the transition word "As a result" and the comma after the transition word "As a result". Many students write like this

That is wrong!

You can also use the semicolon instead of the period. Here is another way to write it.

Alright! We have talked about the simple sentence and the compound sentence. Now! I want to show you a common writing mistake students make.

Look at the following sentence

Can you tell where the mistake is?

Here we have two independent sentences.

There are three ways to make this grammatically correct

1. Simply use period between these two sentences. This is not the best way because of the lack of the transition
2. Use the coordinating conjunction. The comma is put before the coordinating conjunction.
3. Use conjunctive adverb/transition word to connect them. The period is put before the conjunctive adverb. The comma is put after the conjunctive adverb.

Okay! Let's look at the following correct sentences

In the next part, we will be talking about the complex sentence.

So what is a complex sentence? A complex sentence consists of an independent clause and a dependent clause.

Remember when I said an independent clause is a sentence that can express a complete thought? Well...a dependent clause is a sentence that cannot express a complete thought on it's own, so it cannot be used alone.

There are actually three types of dependent clauses.

An adjective clause is a dependent clause that, like an adjective, modifies a noun or pronoun.

Adjective clauses begin with words such as that, when, where, who, whom, whose, which, and why. Here are examples. The highlighted parts are the dependent clauses.

A noun clause is a dependent clause that functions as a noun. It begins words and phrases like that, the fact that, whether, why, how, what, who, how much, and so on. Here are examples. The highlighted parts are the dependent clauses.

An adverbial clause is introduced by a subordinating conjunction like "whereas", 'because', ‘although', ‘while', ‘since', ‘if', ‘when' ..etc.

We can use the following three patterns to construct a complex sentence using the subordinating conjunction:

Let's look at an example of each pattern

This is the first pattern. The subordinating conjunction is "although". The dependent clause is "I feel that television is a distraction". The independent clause is "it doesn't hold a candle to the handheld devices such as phones, tablets, and even laptop computers that distract us from daily communication."

This is the second pattern. The subordinating conjunction is "whereas". The dependent clause is "driving and the bus don't guarantee arrival times or a quick trip". The independent clause is "The subway is the only form of transportation that has a guaranteed schedule and doesn't deal with traffic".

This is the third pattern. The subordinating conjunction is "because". The dependent clause is "they want to learn about new customs and the history of a different place". The independent clause is "People visit a new city".

As you can see, complex sentences are very common. We use them all the time. Let's look at more examples

Ok now! I know this is a lot of information to take in at one time, but don't worry, we are about to look at the last sentence type.

Okay! So the last sentence type is the compound-complex sentence. A compound-complex sentence is basically a combination of a compound and a complex sentence. It consists of two independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.

Here is an example.

Here "Since a manager doesn't give a grade, they will simply fire someone for performing poorly" is a complex sentence.

Now, to make the whole sentence a compound-complex sentence, we would need to connect a compound sentence, and the writer did just that by using "so" to connect the complex sentence to the independent clause "many people are forced to give their best effort and hold themselves accountable for the work they do." which is a compound sentence.