ebrightken wrote:Jan:
What is a difference or is there a difference between a simple sentence and a non simple sentence? Using two sentences could you dhow me the difference?
Ken, a simple sentence has one subject and one verb.
Simple sentence: Jan loves her granddaughters.
In that sentence,
Jan is the
subject (what the sentence is about) and
loves is the
verb (the action).
There are lots of non-simple sentence types. Sentences can be compound, complex, or compound-complex, and they can have more than one subject or verb. It's not super important to know the labels for each sentence, but here are a few examples:
Compound sentence:
Jan loves her granddaughters, and
she visits them whenever she can.
Complex sentence: When Jan thinks about her granddaughters,
she smiles at their silly antics.
Compound-complex: When Jan thinks about her granddaughters,
Jan smiles at their silly antics and
she vows to visit them more often.
As I said, there are other types of non-simple sentences, but the important thing is not their labels. The important thing is to be aware of the sentence structures you use most often, and to make sure that you occasionally combine a few short sentences into longer ones to give your story better flow. If you see that a lot of your sentences are similar, work to find new ways to say the same thing. So if you have a lot of simple sentences like this:
George walked into the room and closed the door.
Betty saw a sparrow on the windowsill.
Ben took his lunch out of the locker.
June wished she was skinnier.
...you can look to find ways to rearrange words or add to the sentence to make it more interesting.
After George sneaked into the room, he silently closed the door behind him.
A sparrow hopping on the windowsill captured Betty's attention.
Peanut butter again! Ben looked at the lunch he had just taken out of his locker in dismay.
I wish I was skinnier, June thought with a sigh.
I've posted lessons here in the past few weeks on the other sentence structures, but everything you really need to know is in a nutshell here. Please let me know if I can clarify any further!