Putting it all together

Of course, we don't have to be limited to one, or even two, connectors in a sentence.

At first the artisans were too shy to look Ma in the eye. But as he sat and interacted with them, they grew to trust him and soon began singing songs from home as Ma accompanied them on cello.

Bridging cultures and good causes with music(2021)

There's a lot going on in this snippet, so let's break it down a little.

We've got two pairs of actions strung together with 'and', with the actors carried through:

He sat and interacted with them.
They grew to trust him and soon began singing songs from home.

We also have two instances of the connector 'as' which tell us about timing:

As he sat and interacted with them, they grew to trust him.
[They] soon began singing songs from home as Ma accompanied them on cello.

And the first connector, 'but', is connecting all that to the previous sentence.

At first the artisans were too shy to look Ma in the eye. But as he sat and interacted with them, they grew to trust him.

On the previous page, we looked at how breaking up a compound sentence with a full stop could be used to create emphasis and voice. In this snippet, it's more to do with information flow and readability. The full stop gives the reader a chance to breathe before diving into the next complicated set of relationships.

This is quite common in non-fiction writing (like reports, essays, news articles, and you might notice that we do it quite a bit in the instructions of these lessons), because a single idea can quickly become very complex so that you need a lot of connectors to show how all the pieces fit together, but the resulting sentence becomes hard to follow because people can only hold so much information in their brains at once. So splitting a piece out can help. (See what we did there?)

Having said that, starting a sentence with a connector can be seen as bad style in some contexts, such as formal academic writing. Sometimes you just have to forego a connector in the name of style and readability.

Check out the first 'as' segment again:

"But as he sat and interacted with them, they grew to trust him."

See how that 'and' segment ("and interacted with them") is nested inside the 'as' segment?

And that 'as' segment is itself nested inside the 'but' segment! "But as he sat and interacted..."

That's something to watch out for as we start to string more simple sentences and connectors together—the structure can become more complex and hierarchical.

Here's another snippet with intricate use of connectors.

See if you can identify how each connector creates meaning, whether in terms of relatedness, timing, causation, concession, or other relationships. And watch out for nested connectors!

Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course—none of us kids had ever even been to the dentist—but since I'd been babysitting and doing other kids' homework for cash, I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.

The Glass Castle(2005)

Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course—none of us kids had ever even been to the dentist—
The pair of em-dashes '—' turns the statement inside them into an aside. It's related and gives more context to the first statement, but it's not the focus of the snippet as a whole.
Since I'd been babysitting and doing other kids' homework for cash, I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.
A causal relationship—earning money through babysitting and doing homework resulted in wanting to save up for braces. Also notice the nested connectors ('and', 'until').
I'd been babysitting and doing other kids' homework for cash.
A pair of actions strung together with 'and', with the actor and verb helpers carried through.
I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.
A connector showing the timing and conditionality of an event.
Mom and Dad had no money for braces of course... but... I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.
We've collapsed some of the less important embedded connections so that it's easier to see the core relationship: a concession that despite the difficulty of getting braces (due to her parents' lack of money), the narrator was determined to get them using her own resources.

How'd you go? That snippet is tricky to analyse. Lots of different kinds of relationships, and lots of nested connectors.

Let's try writing our own multi-connector compound sentences. For this exercise, we'll use the simple sentences from the last snippet and just change the relationships between them using different connectors.

Here are the simple sentences from that snippet again:

Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course.
None of us kids had ever even been to the dentist.
I'd been babysitting.
I'd been doing other kids' homework for cash.
I resolved to save up.
I could afford braces myself.

Mom and Dad had no money for braces of course, and none of us kids had ever even been to the dentist, so I'd been babysitting or doing other kids' homework for cash; I resolved to save up so I could afford braces myself.

Here's another example, but this time we've mixed up the original simple sentences a little.

None of us kids had ever been to the dentist, and I resolved to save up, because Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course, so I started babysitting, then did other kids' homework for cash, but I couldn't afford braces myself.

Your turn. Use different connectors to create different kinds of relationships (e.g. cause and effect, concession, conditions, etc.). Mess around with the simple sentences if you want—swap them around, change the tense, change the actors—it can help you find more possibilities for using different connectors.

Mom and Dad had no money for braces, of course.
None of us kids had ever even been to the dentist.
I'd been babysitting.
I'd been doing other kids' homework for cash.
I resolved to save up.
I could afford braces myself.

Write your variation here.

Connectors and an introduction to complex meaning

Putting it all together