Simple, Complex, and Compound Sentences in Your Writing

It’s much easier to express your ideas clearly when you know how to write different types of sentences. Generally speaking, it means that you should understand the difference between complex, simple, and compound sentences. We hope that this guide from Writers-house team will help you.

Simple Sentences

A simple sentence expresses a complete thought and contains only one independent clause. The shortest sentence of these type consists of a subject and a verb, for example: “She smiled.” There are also verbs that require an object. This type of verbs is called transitive. However, sentences with objects can also be simple, given that they still contain only one independent clause, for example: “They played football.”

Nevertheless, some simple sentences look much more complicated because they are more informative. To add more information, you don’t even need to change the structure of the sentence, for example: “She and I both play tennis well.” In this case, the sentence contains a compound subject, a verb, an adverb (“well“), a direct object, end a determiner (“both“). However, it’s still a simple sentence.

Compound Sentences

Is there is more than one independent clause in one sentence, this sentence is called compound. Quite often, compound sentences include two clauses connected with a coordinated conjunction, for example: “I snoozed, and they left.” “And” is one of the most common coordinating conjunctions. However, there is also an acronym that will help you remember all the most common conjunctions of this type: FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So).

It’s important to understand that different statements inside the same compound sentence also function as sentences by themselves. In addition, we recommend that you don’t forget to put a comma between two independent clauses.

Complex Sentences

A complex sentence includes an independent clause and one or more dependent clauses. A dependent clause contains both a subject and a verb but isn’t logically complete. To connect an independent and a dependent clause, we use subordinate conjunctions (“while,” “until,” “because,” “unless,” etc) to indicate the relationship between two clauses. For example: “I will never become a lawyer unless I go to college.” The main clause is “I will never become a lawyer,” and it’s connected to the subordinate conjunction using “unless.” If you consider the second part of the sentence by itself, it won’t make sense because it doesn’t express a complete thought.

However, it doesn’t mean that you cannot put a dependent clause at the beginning of a sentence. If you start a sentence with a dependent clause, you need to separate these two clauses with a comma. For example: “Unless I go to college, I will never become a lawyer.” You can also write a complex sentence using a relative clause. In this case, you will include a relative pronoun, such as “which” or “who.” For example: “He talks too loud, which makes me angry.” Relative clauses are similar to other dependent clauses because they don’t make any sense without an independent clause.

Compound Complex Sentences

If there are at least one dependent clause and two independent clauses, such a sentence is called compound-complex. For example: “She wears the dress that I bought her, but she doesn’t like it.” This sentence starts with an independent clause, followed by a dependent clause, and a second independent clause. The second independent clause is connected to the rest of the sentence using a coordinating conjunction “but.”

Using Different Types of Sentences

Good writing usually contains all these types of sentences. Therefore, we recommend that you use different types. For example, it’s impossible to express complex ideas using short sentences only. Nevertheless, if you only use complex sentences, your writing will be more difficult to read and comprehend. If you have unnecessary lengthy sentences, try to break them down into shorter ones to improve readability.