Connectors and an introduction to complex meaning

This lesson is primarily about connectors.

We've chosen to set aside a few specific grammatical concepts in order to focus more on a variety of connectors and the meanings we can create with them.

This means we're going to be a bit hand-wavey about concepts such as clauses, and the difference between compound and complex sentences.

• If you already know about these grammatical concepts, then great—you'll see some of each throughout this lesson.
• If not, don't worry: there are a few asides throughout the lesson where these ideas are relevant, and we'll cover clauses and complex sentences in detail in the Complex Sentences lesson.

Ooh, someone's being tricky! Okay, fine let's take a closer look (but if you're not interested in a technical digression, skip this bit!).

First, let's consider the original snippet:

We act as guardians rather than owners.

In this situation, we intuitively recognise 'guardians' and 'owners' as noun groups nested inside a larger prepositional phrase that begins with 'as', which effectively turns them both into adverbs—describing how or in what way we act.

We could rewrite it as:

We act as guardians rather than as owners.

That's why this particular 'scrambled' version still makes sense:

We act as guardians rather than legally.

Normally, an adverb such as 'legally' shouldn't be able to connect to a noun such as 'guardians'.

But in this sentence, 'as guardians' creates a prepositional/adverbial phrase, which let's us make sense of the connection to the adverb 'legally' (as in, "We act as guardians, which doesn't necessarily mean we act legally").

While we call these things connectors in Writelike, you'll find them called a few different things in the real world.

We don't need to go into details now, but it's worth knowing that the following terms overlap to varying degrees:

• 'Connector' – a loose term for all words, phrases and punctuation that can be used to join stuff together.
• 'Connective' – mostly interchangeable with connector, but sometimes excludes punctuation.
• 'Conjunction' – a joining word like AND, but not punctuation, connector adverbs—like 'however', 'namely'—or phrases—like 'rather than', 'even though'.
• 'Cohesive device' – a really broad category that includes some connectors, but also things like pronouns and a few other word types that improve the 'flow' of a piece of writing.

There's a level in between word groups and sentences called a 'clause'. The definition of a simple sentence is a sentence that only has one clause in it.

There are different kinds of clauses that do different kinds of things, and we're going to discuss them in more detail in other lessons.

For this lesson, we're mainly interested in two kinds of clauses: the kind that we could write on its own as a simple sentence (otherwise known as an 'independent clause'), and the kind we're introducing on this page, where some of the information is carried over from a previous clause.

To keep things simple and stay focused on connectors, we're going to continue highlighting both these clause types as 'simple sentences' in this lesson and tackle clauses more truthfully later.

You might have noticed in the last two snippets that the actor wasn't the only thing that carried through. Let's look at that last snippet again:

"But people weren't rushing to their next class, or playing around, or spinning the locks on their lockers."

All the verbs, 'rushing', 'playing' and 'spinning', are in what's known as the 'continuous tense', which you usually make using the verb 'to be' + the main verb in its '-ing' form ("were rushing", "were playing", "were spinning"). But in this snippet, the tense helper, 'were', and the negative, 'n't', only appear in the first clause. It's carried over in the following parts, just like the actor ('people').

This is also true for other types of verb helpers, like modal verbs ('can', 'could', 'will', 'would', and so on):

"People could rush to their next class, or play around, or spin the locks on their lockers."

There is more about verb helpers (like tense helpers and modal verbs in the Verb groups lesson from the word groups course.

You'll notice throughout this lesson that some compound sentences have a comma as well as a connector, and some just have the connector. A pure grammar guide might give you these rules:

1. Add a comma whenever you are connecting two simple sentences:
   "I'd shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too."
2. Don't add a comma if the actor and verb helpers are being carried through:
   "A bale of hay has come loose and spilt itself all over."

If you just want to leave it at that for your own writing, that's fine.

But we've already seen a whole bunch of snippets that don't follow those rules. So what's going on?

Commas create separation. Leaving out a comma that should be there can make two things feel more closely related:

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

 vs.

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

Adding in commas slows the reader down. The commas in this snippet help the reader understand what's happening (or not happening), and add weightiness to the situation:

"But people weren't rushing to their next class, or playing around, or spinning the locks on their lockers."

 vs.

"But people weren't rushing to their next class or playing around or spinning the locks on their lockers."

It's important, though, if you're playing around with adding or removing commas, that you don't make your sentence harder to read or understand. If you're not sure, ask a friend to sense-check for you.

What happens if we rewrite the snippets with the other connector, keeping the cause and effect the same?

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

The rewrite: He wanted me dead so he tapped his own life force.

The original snippet places the most emphasis on the effect ("he tapped his own life force"), whereas our rewrite emphasises the reason ("he wanted me dead").

How about the other one?

The original: He could poke it from his side so it would fall out on the other side.

The rewrite: It would fall out on the other side because he could poke it from his side.

Again we've shifted the emphasis, this time from the cause ("poking it from his side") to the effect ("the key falling out on the other side").

Which way you use will depend on what's most important, or whatever sounds best to you.

There's an aspect to connectors that we've been conveniently ignoring, which is 'coordination' vs. 'subordination'.

In case you missed the aside earlier this lesson, there's a level in between word groups and sentences called 'clauses'. Clauses are important for understanding coordination and subordination.

'Coordinating connectors' (such as 'and', 'but', 'or', 'yet', and a few others) are not part of either clause that they are connecting.

This is actually the strictly grammatical definition of 'compound sentence' that we alluded to earlier in this lesson—a sentence where the connector is not part of a clause.

Coordinating connectors must go in between two clauses.

We can swap the clauses around like this:

and the sentence still makes sense (although the meaning might change).

But the connector can't move or you end up with gibberish:

(A quick note: this is known as a 'run-on sentence', because it's two sentences that just run into each other without anything to control the flow and intonation. They're difficult for readers to follow, so if you see any in your writing, try to fix them with full stops—"But I won't go. There are puppies."—or connectors—"But I won't go because there are puppies.")

'Subordinating connectors' (like 'if', 'because', 'though', and many, many others) are actually part of the clause they introduce.

We can swap the clauses around like this, with no change in meaning:

The connector can move, but it has to take the rest of the clause it is attached to with it.

From a strict grammatical perspective, we would call sentences with subordinating connectors 'complex sentences'.

We talk more about subordination in the lesson on complex sentences. For this lesson, the important thing is to recognise that 'if' is a connector, it can appear in unusual places in the sentence, and that there are lots of other connectors that can do the same thing.

As for why 'if' clauses seem more likely to show up at the start of a sentence than other connectors, it's probably just a collective habit from when English required conditions to be constructed with 'if...then' (as in "if you climbed the dying jarrah trees down there towards the creek, then you could see the lights of the city").

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.

1. 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.
2. 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').
3. 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.
4. I resolved to save up until I could afford braces myself.
   A connector showing the timing and conditionality of an event.
5. 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.

• 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.

• Relatedness – just showing that two statements are related (you can do this with 'and' and some kinds of punctuation, like semicolons).
• Time – for example 'as', 'when', 'then', 'before', 'until', and many others.
• Manner – 'like', 'as if' and 'how' show the manner in which something is done by comparing it to another event.
• Concession – connectors like 'but', 'yet' and 'even though' show when two statements are somehow in opposition.
• Cause and effect – connectors like 'so', 'because', 'as' and 'therefore' show causal relationships.
• Conditions – 'if', 'unless' and 'otherwise' show that one thing is the condition of another happening.

Can you think of other kinds of relationships you can make with connectors? (For example, we left logical relationships, which are created by 'and', 'or' and 'not', out of this lesson.)

• Carrying the actor (and verb helpers) through.
• Using punctuation as connectors.
• Putting a full stop in front of a connector to create emphasis, voicing, or just control flow and readability.

Here are the snippets from the previous page again, just as a reference for what some of this looks like in practice.
 

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.

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.

Grab any random paragraph and highlight the connectors. What happens if you swap segments around? What if you change the connectors?

Try looking for connectors in different kinds of texts (stories, essays, news articles, internet forum threads, and so on). Do you notice any differences in the kinds and number of connectors being used?