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Although ordinary conversation, personal letters, and even some
types of professional writing (such as newspaper stories) consist
almost entirely of simple sentences, your university or
college instructors will expect you to be able to use all types of
sentences in your formal academic writing. Writers who
use only simple sentences are like a truck drivers who do
not know how to shift out of first gear: they would be able to drive a
load from Montréal to Calgary (eventually), but they would have a
great deal of trouble getting there.
If you use phrases and clauses carefully,
your sentences will become much more interesting and your
ideas, much clearer. This complex sentence develops a
major, central idea and provides structured background
information:
- Since it involves the death not only of the title character but
of the entire royal court, Hamlet is the most extreme
of the tragedies written by the Elizabethan playwrite William
Shakespeare.
Just as a good driver uses different gears, a good writer uses
different types of sentences in different situations:
- a long complex sentence will show what information
depends on what other information;
- a compound sentence will emphasise balance and
parallelism;
- a short simple sentence will grab a reader's
attention;
- a loose sentence will tell the reader in advance
how to interpret your information;
- a periodic sentence will leave the reader in
suspense until the very end;
- a declarative sentence will avoid any special
emotional impact;
- an exclamatory sentence, used sparingly, will jolt
the reader;
- an interrogative sentence will force the reader to
think about what you are writing; and
- an imperative sentence will make it clear that you
want the reader to act right away.
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