Four and a half types of sentence

Conclusion

That’s the end of this lesson. Let's do a recap.

We've seen that there are 4 basic types of sentence:

  • Statements give information.
  • Questions ask for information.
  • Commands give an instruction.
  • Exclamations are short emotional reactions (often of surprise)—and unlike the other sentence types, exclamations aren't made of clauses.
  • Anything else that doesn't quite fit or make sense by itself, we often call a fragment. Fragments are used when the situation makes it clear what they mean (common in dialogue), and when the writer wants to make their writing sound more 'punchy' or emphatic.

We've seen that we can combine sentence types in different ways to create interesting effects in our writing. For example:

  • Emphasising emotions.
  • Controlling the pace of a passage.
  • Showing the relationships between characters.
  • Making a character's thoughts feel more dynamic.
  • And lots more that we haven't explicitly covered!

Finally, we saw that we can create complex meaning (by using supporting clauses or connectors) with different sentence types in the same way as we have learnt in the previous sentence construction lessons.

Congrats!

Pay attention to how people talk. Listen for different sentence types—especially fragments. This can be quite hard to do, but the results can be very interesting!

Notice when writers use sentence types other than statements (statements are generally the default). What do you notice about how different text types (stories, reports, manuals, articles) use sentence types?

What effects do you notice from different combinations of sentence types? What do sentence types tell you about the characters in a story and the relationships they have with each other?

We drew snippets from a lot of different texts in this lesson. Here are the main ones:

Burning for Revenge is the 5th book in John Marsden's Tomorrow series, about 5 friends who return from a camping trip in the bush to discover that their town has been occupied by an invading army.

R.J. Palacio's Wonder follows the school life of a boy, Auggie, who has an extraordinary facial difference, and is attending a mainstream school for the first time in grade 5.

Koyasan is the story of a girl who must face her deepest fears and venture into the world of malicious spirits in order to save her baby sister.

Treasure Island is a classic adventure story of pirates, treasure, mutiny and general swashbuckling.

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