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The sentence always has been—in too many English classes—a traditional, formal, even pompous affair that many students learned to hate. If you were one of these students, you probably were among the majority of your classmates in elementary and high school—if indeed you even had any formal instruction in how to write a sentence. Either way, once you have tried to use or even have just looked at a formal grammar handbook, you may feel that the formal rules of making sentences, sentence parts, and punctuation for them are a highly specialized method of torture invented just to cause you exquisite suffering. You may have found yourself sweating over papers and growing red in the face when speaking in public as you try to figure out where to put the pauses of commas and colons, where to begin and end sentences, and how to use them to start, continue, and end paragraphs. A popular fantasy in the backs of the minds of many people, in fact, is that the whole grammar thing was invented by evil grammar villains: little, ancient gnomes with umpteen college degrees working in small rooms in high towers of dark university castles in rooms never lit by the sun, who gather secretly just to make the rules torturous so that no one will ever, ever—no matter how hard he or she tries—get the grammar thing right.

This reminds me of my hardest teacher ever, Mrs. Seward, and her best student, Alice Robinson. I took Mrs. Seward’s English courses twice, in my first and third years of high school, and I dreaded each one. She was everything traditional and formal that Mr. Golding was, but with none of the fun and fire. Mrs. Seward was nearly the smallest person in the whole school, teachers and students included, and yet possibly the scariest. Even other teachers feared her knife-quick ear for grammar mistakes as they stumbled over their speech when she was nearby.

I was a very good student, but I couldn’t quite get past Mrs. Seward. She never (as far as anyone knew) gave out more than one “A” per course, and sometimes not any. And my main competitor in high school, Alice Robinson, knew her grammar better than I and was willing to slave away over learning the rules more than I was. Mrs. Seward made the sentence, and indeed all grammar, as torturous as my worst dreams. We memorized rules and recited them. We had objective tests that required definition and example, and multiple-choice tests on goodand bad usage of grammar. We diagrammed the parts of sentences endlessly.

I learned a lot from Mrs. Seward, and I owe her a debt of thanks, especially since I became an English teacher myself. I also owe an even greater debt of thanks to my mother, an elementary and later a community college teacher, who spent most of my life correcting my grammar. She and Mrs. Seward together did quite a job on me.

However, in all honesty, I think my mother’s grammar lessons were better because they were in situ, which means they occurred right in each situation: I was talking, and she corrected me as I actually practiced communicating. I’m not sure that Mrs. Seward’s drill-and-kill methods were the best way for many, maybe even most, people in my classes. I suspect that we should have done more writing practice, just as my mother corrected me in the middle of my speaking practice. And I suspect that Mrs. Seward should have had us learning to visualize and experience the English sentence more, rather than just learn a bunch of rules about it. I (and Alice Robinson, who kept beating me for that one “A” per semester) were among the few who were able to memorize rules well and then apply them to what little writing we did. Most other people seem to have more trouble doing this. So if Mrs. Seward’s grammar lessons were hard for me, I imagine they must have been a nightmare for many of my classmates. She represented the traditional, more rule-bound and difficult-to-learn aspect of the English sentence; indeed, when I was in high school I would not have been surprised to discover that she, herself, had been elected to serve as one of the mysterious, ancient gnomes in their ivory towers who seem to create grammar rules to bring humankind misery.

When I started teaching, I came across a number of students who said, typically, “I have never understood grammar and probably never will.” I decided that part of the problem was not in these students or in grammar itself, but rather in the way that grammar is taught. Lessons in grammar primarily use what is sometimes called the left side or the “verbal-logical” part of the brain—the same part that tends to help people learn foreign languages, abstract mathematics, and literary texts well. However, a significant number of undergraduate college students learn better using another part of the brain, one sometimes called the right side or “visual-sensory” part. And some students are more comfortable using both parts. Grammar instruction really is not well developed in most textbooks to help students who prefer a partly or wholly visual-sensory orientation.

So, in my early years of teaching, I began to look for a more visual symbol of the sentence as a starting point for explaining grammar. I thought of everything—planes, trains, and automobiles; bacteria, animals, birds, and people; machines; weather patterns; etc. One of my early ideas came from my first-grade teacher, who used the symbol of a train. “Imagine,” she used to say, in words like this but aimed at first graders, “that a sentence is like a train. The subject of the car is the engine. It pulls the train. The verb of the sentence is the coal car. It gives the sentence energy. And all the other cars coming after it are the rest of the words in a sentence that make it more interesting.”

The engine and coal car symbol are not too bad, but I decided right away not to use it. This was because my first-grade teacher, years earlier, had been as ancient as the hills even then. By the time I started teaching, coal cars were a thing of the past. Second, the idea of a sentence being like a train seemed to me a bit too mechanical. I wanted something conveying the idea of the sentence being a living, breathing organism, one with a life of its own.

That is when I decided to compare the sentence to an animal. The animal’s head would represent the subject of a sentence; its body would represent the verb of a sentence. Here’s why. All sentences in the English language have a subject and a verb: all of them. In some languages, they don’t, but in English they do. In Latin, for example, you could say, “I love” in one word and thus have a one-word sentence:

In other words, some other languages show a direct correspondence between an act and a single word to represent it. If, for example, I were to wave my arm through the air in front of you, that one, single movement in ____________ could be stated as follows:

However, we speakers of the English language (and those who speak many other languages as well) divide all acts into two parts: the doer of the act and the physical act itself. This means that if I want to the Latin “Amo,” above, in English, I will have to divide it into who is doing it and what is being done:

In addition, if I want to describe how I waved my arm in one single movement, again I have to divide the event into the person doing it and what is being done:.

There are many two-word sentences, each with a “head” (the subject) and a “body” (the verb):

One of the most famous two-word sentences can be found in the Christian New Testament:

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“But what about all the rest of the words that aren’t the subject or verb?” I asked myself.

The sentence is a marvelous, wonderful thing. It can be very short or very long. Look at these examples from famous sources and writers.

This is said to be the shortest sentence in the Christian New Testament. It is a complete sentence.

“Jesus wept.”

Here are more sentences. The one-word sentences are commands. These commands are verbs. As sentences, they are considered to have two parts, just as does “Jesus wept” above: each command sentence has a “hidden” subject, the word “You.”

Go. = (You) go.

Wait. = (You) wait.

“Know Thyself” = (You) know thyself.

This next example is of a long sentence by Nobel Prizewinning South American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He wrote the original in Spanish. In this English translation, notice how relatively easy the sentence is to understand, in spite of its length. It is easy because Marquez organizes his sentences especially well. We will discuss his organization of sentences later, below.

Here are two more examples of long sentences, both written by U.S. author William Faulkner, who was especially famous for such sentences. Read the two—more than once, if you need to—to understand them.

(William Faulkner. “The Bear.” American Poetry and Prose, 4^th Ed., Part II. Ed. Norman Foerster. Boston : Houghton Mifflin, 1962. 1531-1583.)

“[The bear] loomed and towered in [the boy’s] dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods [forest where no ax has been used] where it left its crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just bit, too big for the dogs which tried to bay [howl at] it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they fired into it; too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, and through [the bear] ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable ad invincible out of an old dead tie, a phantom, [symbol] and [high point] of the old wild life which the little puny humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant… (1532).

One of the easiest ways to remember the strong English sentence is to think of a peacock:

A peacock must have a head and a body to survive. A sentence in English also must have a head and a body to survive. The subject--the person, place, or thing the sentence is about--is the head of the peacock. In addition, the verb--the active part--is the body of the peacock:

Peacocks also have feathers--some very beautiful ones, sometimes. The feathers curve out from the rear end in an array of rainbow designs, catching light, floating, waving, sometimes even dragging on the ground, so long are they. These feathers on the tail are all the different words and phrases a person can stick onto the end of a sentence to make it more colorful and descriptive:

Also, look at the peacock's head--did you ever notice that a peacock has a few beautiful feathers sticking up and back from its head? There are just a few of these head feathers, perhaps so they do not get in the way of the body:

This means Subject-Verb-Modifier. We have discussed subjects and verbs. Modifiers simply are added words that modify or describe something. Here is how our peacock looks with the S-V-M label:

Instead, if we wish to consider the little bit of head feathers, too, we can label the peacock like this:

All three are very much the same--the S-V-M peacock model of the sentence. We will use this label--S-V-M--to refer to all three of the above sentence models as we discuss sentence construction below.

Remember one more thing: do not stick a bunch of tail feathers on your peacocks' noses. It just will make your sentences stop breathing and die in their tracks. Let's see why. Here is an example of a sentence with many tail feathers stuck on its nose:

In the morning just in time, before dawn but after the dew, calling and walking in circles but never feeling happy, never knowing love or affection, never feeling fed or watered, restless, tired, and drooping, the peacock waited.

The S-V of the sentence above is "the peacock waited." The M is everything that comes before the S-V. The main problem with a sentence like this is that we must wait a long time to find out what is happening. We have to wait too long before we get to the subject of the sentence and its verb. Imagine a news article or a long essay with lots of sentences like this. We would find it hard to read quickly and easily.

Newspaper and magazine editors long have realized that the best kind of sentence construction for clear, easy reading is the S-V-M kind (including S-V and S-M-V-M). This kind of sentence construction makes an article or essay march right across the page from scene to scene and idea to idea--clearly, logically, and easily. People enjoy reading such sentences much more: they do not have to work so hard at understanding the sentence, and they are therefore much freer to get caught up in the scenes and ideas you are trying to express.

You may wish to use other visual models for sentence making. For example, we can think of a complete English sentence as being a traditional locomotive with a coal car. The locomotive is the subject of the sentence. However, it requires energy--fuel--to go anywhere. So it cannot move, it cannot be a complete sentence, unless we hook a coal car right behind it. The coal car with all of its fuel energy is the verb of the sentence. We could put the coal car further back and stick other cars between the engine and coal cars, but then it would be harder to get the coal to the engine. The best place for most--often all--of the other train cars is right after the coal car.

In real life, the action and the person doing the action always is one complete flow or whole of reality. This whole or completeness of doer and action is so united that some foreign languages combine subject and verb in one word--just as they are combined in reality. Latin, for example, says "I love" in this way:

English, however, is different. We usually separate any real event into two words: the person or thing doing it, and the action performed. And the easiest way to figure out who is doing what is to state it near the beginning of the sentence:

is running down the lane to catch
his master, jump up and down, and bark for joy.

As you can see above, everything on the left--no matter how long--is par of the "Doer/." In addition, everything on the right--no matter how long--is part of the "/is doing." We can divide almost every English sentence into these two basic Doer/is doing parts. The best way to write Doer/is doing sentences clearly is to put the Doer/ first and the /is doing second. This makes a strong, clear sentence that is easy to control and read.

Let me offer two more quick tips: First, try to vary your sentence lengths when you write: research suggests that sentences that are all the same length bore readers. ( Reading sentences of the same length is like listening to a humidifier or the white snow on a radio--great for falling asleep.)

Second, there is one major exception, perhaps, to the rule against putting long modifiers before a peacock--before the subject and verb. Look at the following sentence:

If you would like a major exception to the rule, and if you are willing to use this exception sparingly, here it / is.

Notice the subject and verb: it / is. All the words before those two are modifiers. However, the modifiers before "here it is" are grouped in a special way: they have their own subject-verb patterns within them (and are called "dependent clauses"). They are not complete sentences by themselves because of the two uses of the word "if." Nevertheless, each of the two groups that start with "if" does have its own subject and its own verb form that people can understand and read clearly. If you like to write subject-verb modifiers (dependent clauses), like these two, at the beginnings of sentences, then go ahead: but not too excessively. Most of the time, people probably will understand them easily.

That is basic sentence making. May you do your doings and color your peacocks well.

NEW COLOR SCHEMES
1. new gold (for highest levels) Hex={FF,B9,35}	2. new gold moved to nearby hexagon (secondary levels) Hex={FF,CC,00}	3. light match to new gold and new brown (tertiary levels) Hex={FF,C2,53}	4. lighter match to new gold and new brown (quaternary) Hex={FF,CF,75}
new brown (for top brown bars) Hex={E8,97,00}
new gold moved directly left to red-gold, and lightened (OK) (5th level?) Hex={FF,88,66}	lighter version of "...red-gold" (Ann hasn't seen it, yet.) (5th level?) Hex={FF,A3,88}	old brown (OK) Hex={FF,8F,20}	light version of old brown (OK) Hex={FF,B8,71}

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The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.