Four and a half types of sentence

Wrapping up

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!

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