Joining simple sentences

Connectors don't only join word groups. One of the easiest ways to create complex meaning is to smash two simple sentences together using a connector.

See if you can identify the connectors in these snippets. How are they different from just using a full stop or period?

Brian turned the wheel slightly and the plane immediately banked to the right.

Hatchet(2000)

They singled you out when they hissed your name.

Koyasan(2006)

Now I had prickly heat like my whole skin was burning, hot pinpricks all over me.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

He tapped his own life force because he wanted me dead.

The Woman Who Rides Like a Man(1986)

Vicious pain rips through my body even though nothing strikes me.

Children of Blood and Bone(2018)

If you climbed the dying jarrah trees down there towards the creek, you'd see the lights of the city.

That Eye, the Sky(1986)

You're not going to marry Violet figuratively—you're going to marry her literally!

The Bad Beginning

Connectors convey the relationships between things. They tell us why two statements have been written next to each other.

Choose two simple sentences from different snippets above and join them together using a connector of your choosing. What do you think of the result?

For convenience, we're going to call this type of construction a 'compound sentence', but it's worth noting that this is not strictly correct.

If we were being strictly grammatical, only the first snippet on this page would be a compound sentence (for reasons we'll discuss in other lessons).

But there isn't another term that groups all of these together nicely, so—for Writelike purposes—'compound sentences' will have to do.

Connectors and an introduction to complex meaning

Joining simple sentences