Here are the five basic sentence structures:ġ. At a more advanced level, they will provide you some reliable tools to make meaning and tune your style. As an experienced reader and writer, I think of these distinctions less often than you might imagine, but they are necessary to produce correct and effective sentences with purposeful punctuation.
Ten sentences form that paragraph, and I wrote it, in part, to illustrate the basic variety of sentence structures. And several paragraphs, sometimes many, are required to write an essay, report or chapter for a book. More often, though, several sentences join together in a paragraph to develop a thesis or idea. One complete sentence, or even a fragment or a word, can serve as a paragraph.
But if that clause expresses an incomplete thought, it is called subordinate or dependent, and we have to attach it to a main clause, or it will not be considered Standard English. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a sentence. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause.
