Building and Combining Sentences

An English teacher appears. He appears out of nowhere. He drops a few sentences into your laptop. The sentences are simple.

Or . . .

An English teacher appears out of nowhere and drops a few simple sentences into your laptop.

This little exercise in turning a few short sentences into one longer one is called, sensibly enough, sentence combining. It's a method of teaching (and learning) different ways of composing sentences--a method that's generally more effective than instruction in formal grammar.

Let's try it by putting these three sentences together:

• The dancer was not tall.
• The dancer was not slender.
• The dancer was extremely elegant.

Cutting out the needless repetition and adding a couple of conjunctions, we might write this: "The dancer was not tall or slender, but she was extremely elegant." Or this: "The dancer was neither tall nor slender but extremely elegant." Or even this: "Neither tall nor slender, the dancer was nonetheless extremely elegant."

Which version is grammatically correct?

All three of them.

Then which version is most effective?

Now that's the right question. And the answer (as discussed in Introduction to Sentence Combining) depends on several factors, beginning with the context in which the sentence appears.

Despite appearances, the primary purpose of sentence combining is not to encourage the writing of longer sentences. (In fact, some exercises invite us to break up sentences that run on for too long.) In teacher talk, we say that sentence combining is a means of improving stylistic dexterity and syntactic maturity.

Put more simply, sentence combining can help us to become better writers. With regular practice, we should soon find ourselves composing original sentences that are clear, coherent, emphatic, and varied in their sound and structure.

Sentence combining is an exercise. It is a writing exercise. It is a useful exercise. So let's give sentence combining a try.

Practice in Building & Combining Sentences:

• Introduction to Sentence Combining
• Sentence Building with Prepositional Phrases
• Sentence Combining: "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed"
• Sentence Combining: Orwell's "A Hanging"