Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
King’s College London Pre-Sessional Programme
Sentence Structure – Simple, Compound, Complex
and Compound-Complex
Look at the following famous historical phrase:
The Civil Rights Movement
What do you think it means? Where did it happen? Who was involved?
Now read the following to check your answers:
Who was Rosa Parks?
Why is she seen as an important character in this movement?
What did she actually do? What happened to her? What was the result of this?
While the passage is grammatically correct, there is a small problem with the style
of the sentences. Can you identify what the problems are?
1
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Look at the following comments about the passage.



Paragraphs 1 and 4 have too many compound sentences. This style is
boring because so many sentences use and as the connector.
Paragraph 2 has too many simple sentences. This style sounds choppy.
Paragraph 3 uses a good mixture of sentence types.
Now look at the improved version:
What are the differences? Why is it an improvement?
Now look at the following comments:


Paragraph 1 and 4 are better because of the use of complex sentences.
The whole passage has a good mixture of sentence types.
What do you think is meant by:
A simple sentence
A compound sentence
Can you think of any examples of each?
2
A complex sentence
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Independent and Dependent Clauses:
A clause is a group of words containing a subject and a verb. Read the descriptions
of both types below and decide what the key difference is.
Look at the following exercise – decide which of the following is dependent or
independent:
3
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Sentence types:
1. Write one simple sentence with one subject and one verb.
2. Write one simple sentence with one subject and two verbs.
3. Write one simple sentence with two subjects and one verb.
4. Write one simple sentence with two subjects and two verbs.
5. Is the following sentence a simple one? Why (not)?
Freshwater is found in rivers, and salt water is found in the sea.
4
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
5
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Try to connect the following pairs of simple sentences using FANBOYS:
6
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Which of the above are synonyms of FANBOYS?
Connect the following – this time with conjunctive adverbs:
7
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Extended practice:
8
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
9
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
There is one more type of sentence structure that we haven’t covered yet. As
the name suggests, it looks very complicated, but follows very similar rules to the
above sentence types.
A compound-complex sentence
What do you think this is? Can you give an example?
10
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
11
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
Final Practice:
12
Adapted from Writing Academic English – Oshima and Hogue (2006) – Pearson Education – JU
13