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The focus of this lesson is what's inside a sentence. We're going to look at lots of simple sentences, break them down into their elements, and then write our own variations.
Simple sentences
Introduction
1. Introduction
Simple sentences
2. What’s in a sentence?
3. Who did what?
4. What did what?
5. Who did what how?
6. Who did what where?
7. When did they do it, and why/how?
8. Practice identifying sentence elements
9. Advanced: What was happening?
Wrapping up
10. Checkpoint – Putting simple sentences together
11. See you next time
Introduction
1. Introduction
You won't see a lot of hardcore grammar in this lesson.
We're going to take a step back from noun groups, verb groups, and prepositional phrases, and instead we'll talk about sentences in terms of the real-world things they represent—things, actions, places, and so on.
Simple sentences
2. What’s in a sentence?
We mostly talk about the world in terms of people, places, things, actions, time, and qualities.
Sentences let us link all these different elements together to create meaning.
Study the sentences below. What’s one thing they all have in common?
Mr Cartright sighed.
A heavy snow was falling.
Sajid scowled horribly.
Griphook jumped down from his shoulders.
In cold winters the Queen does revert to knitted woollen hose for warmth.
You might have noticed that every one of these sentences has an action.
You’ll find this is almost always true: every sentence contains at least one action/event/process.
A 'simple sentence' is a sentence that only contains one action.
Now let's get up close to some simple sentences and rewrite them to learn how they work.
3. Who did what?
This first snippet is about as simple as you can get in a sentence.
Mr Cartright sighed.
Person-Action.
There's nothing else! No things, no qualities, no time or place.
Let's create our own sentences using exactly the same structure.
Chandi cried.
The Queen sniffed.
Your turn
A 'person' doesn't have to just be a name, or a proper noun ("Mr Cartright", "Chandi", "Lady Gray"...). It can be a pronoun ("I", "she", "they", "nobody", etc.), or even something more descriptive ("the folks back home", "the head of the toothpaste committee"). (Check out the Noun groups lesson for more on this).
The children of the Moodey Building cheered.
The 'action' can also be more complex, using helper verbs to change tense, modality, or give other shades of meaning. (Check out the Verb groups lesson for more about this).
"You're not going to die."
Your turn
So you see, even these simple sentences can be quite long.
4. What did what?
Here’s another simple snippet. What's the pattern here?
A heavy snow was falling.
Thing-Action.
Is this really different to the person-action pattern we saw on the last page? From a purely grammatical standpoint, they're the same: we could describe them both as a noun group followed by a verb group.
But from a style perspective, we can use the difference between people and things to get particular effects in our writing, so it's good to get some practice now!
Summer came.
His clown pants caught fire.
Your turn
5. Who did what how?
This next snippet has three elements. What are they?
Sajid scowled horribly.
This sentence answers the question:
Who did what and how?
What other sentences could we write using the same pattern?
Maria nodded gratefully.
My mother’s friend was about to leave in a complete rage.
Notice how the last one uses exactly the same pattern, but each of the elements is a word group instead of a single word.
Keep in mind that longer is not necessarily better though!
Your turn
We can use a 'thing' instead of a 'person' in this pattern, too, just like we did on the previous page.
Koyasan's spine turned to ice.
Summer dragged on painfully slowly.
The supermarket smelled like ice cream and floor polish.
Your turn
6. Who did what where?
Here's a snippet that uses a place.
Griphook jumped down from his shoulders.
Now let's use the same pattern to create our own versions.
Adir stepped into the hall.
The rocket was just about to pass by Jupiter.
Your turn
7. When did they do it, and why/how?
In cold winters the Queen does revert to knitted woollen hose for warmth.
This snippet has two new elements.
- It has a time.
- It also has a quality—in this instance a quality that explains 'why', but it could equally have one that explained 'how'.
Let's write our own versions!
Every morning Jamie ate canned tuna happily.
After sunset the owls open their eyes one by one.
Your turn
8. Practice identifying sentence elements
Now that you've seen a bunch of different sentence patterns, see how you go breaking up these simple sentences. For each one, ask yourself:
- What elements are included in the sentence?
- Does the sentence fit one of the patterns we already looked at?
- What question is the sentence answering? (e.g. who did what, what happened when, how did they do it...)
- And, most importantly, keep asking yourself the most basic question: does the sentence only have one action or process?
They were all contributing generously.
On Christmas Eve, many years ago, I lay quietly in my bed.
Neither my mother nor my father could come see the play on opening night.
Before the war, I found summer storms exciting.
For three days and three nights this waiting-game went on.
Like conger eel it is usually poached in a strong ale.
Snookle was delivered one morning with the milk.
How did you go? There are so many possible combinations of elements! But hopefully you feel a bit more confident identifying what's in a sentence.
Your turn
9. Advanced: What was happening?
We're going to look at one more type of simple sentence which needs a little more understanding of conventional grammar than what we've looked at so far.
There was a low, mocking laugh behind him.
In this snippet, what exactly is the word 'there'? Is it a place? A thing?
It's not really either of those things. This is where our conventional grammar comes in.
Most sentences in English follow a basic pattern called subject-verb-(object) ('object' is in brackets because not all sentences need an object).
- The 'subject' is whatever is doing the action.
- The 'verb' is the action.
- The '(object)' is what the action is being done to.
So in a sentence like:
Ao-fei ate the sandwich.
- The central verb is 'ate'.
- The object eaten is 'the sandwich'.
- The subject doing the eating is 'Ao-fei'.
Nice and straightforward.
Now let's look at our original snippet again.
There was a low, mocking laugh behind him.
- The action is 'being'.
- The object that is being is 'a low mocking laugh'.
- The subject that is doing the being is... wait—that doesn't make sense.
What or who is being a low, mocking laugh? There's no good answer—the laugh just 'is'.
But the English language makes us put something as a placeholder anyway. The fancy term is an 'empty subject' (because grammatically it's a subject but it doesn't actually mean anything).
Let's look at a few more examples.
It was just after dark.
It always rains.
Your turn
Wrapping up
10. Checkpoint – Putting simple sentences together
If you go looking for longish snippets of text that only use simple sentences, you'll find it surprisingly hard.
The fact is that simple sentences are quite limiting on their own, and putting a lot of them together can make a paragraph sound jarring or repetitive.
But this can be useful sometimes. Here's a snippet from The Martian, where the main character is mentally checking through some equipment to figure out what he can use.
(The section in brackets is its own sentence. The brackets are used instead of a full stop to show it's a related thought.)
Martinez's space suit was in the rover. Johanssen's was outwitting the regulator. Lewis's was serving as a water tank. I didn't want to mess with mine (hey, it's custom-fitted!).
Notice how it's essentially a list: This is here. This is doing this. That's doing this other thing. I can't use that (it's special!).
It's snappy and easy to follow – you get a quick rundown of all the things in the scene and what they're currently doing.
Let's try it for ourselves.
The leaves rose from the pavement. Gigantic trees blocked out the sun. The wind whistled ferociously. The elves were ready to fight the whole world (well, their weapons were ready).
She wanted roast beef. I wanted grilled halloumi. She stamped hard on my foot. I wasn't going to argue anymore (hey, I hike twice a week!).
Now have a go yourself. You can try to stick with the same kinds of elements as were in the original snippet (like in the first rewrite), or you might like to change it up a little (like the second rewrite). But make sure you only use simple sentences.
Your turn
11. See you next time
That's the end of this lesson about simple sentences—sentences that have only one action or process.
We've seen about a dozen different patterns you can make in a simple sentence, and there are hundreds more. The important thing is to get the hang of reading a sentence and breaking it down into elements.
Canon XTi components after disassembly by particlem is licensed under CC BY 2.0
See you next time!
Where did the snippets come from?
We used snippets from a wide range of texts in this lesson.
Our checkpoint snippet came from The Martian by Andy Weir. In The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney is stranded on Mars and relies on his own ingenuity and resourcefulness to survive.
