Sentences: Simple, Compound, and Complex
Experienced writers use a variety of sentences to make their writing
interesting and lively. Too many simple sentences, for example, will
sound choppy and immature while too many long sentences will be
difficult to read and hard to understand.
This page contains definitions of simple, compound, and complex
sentences with many simple examples. The purpose of these examples is
to help the ESL/EFL learner to identify sentence basics including
identification of sentences in the short quizzes that follow. After
that, it will be possible to analyze more complex sentence varieties.
Simple Sentence
A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, contains a
subject and a verb, and it expresses a complete thought. In the
following simple sentences, subjects are in yellow, and verbs are in
green.
