How To Write A Sentence

If it's going to express an idea, it has to have a verb in it. So, something has to happen, someone has to do something, someone has to be something. So the verb is the essential part.

A verb needs a subject, now that's a grammatical term, it's not the same as subject in the sense of topic or what we are talking about. So, the subject is a noun or pronoun. I'm going to take the example of a proper noun, Robert, and the pronoun that we will use, when we refer to him again is “he.

” So, subject and verb, “Robert sings”, that's a sentence. Doesn't tell you much, but it's enough. The test is whether you can pass on the information to somebody else.

So, you hear somebody say “Robert sings”, or you read “Robert sings”, you walk next door and you can tell somebody else and they will understand what you're telling them. You can then add what Robert sings and that's called the object. So, we have now “Robert sings folk songs”; subject, verb, object.

And that is the basic structure of every sentence; subject, verb, object. We can go on adding information; we can put information before the subject. So, we could say, “Whenever he goes to the pub, Robert sings folk songs”.

We can put information after the object, we could say, “Whenever Robert goes to the pub, he sings folk songs arranged by his brother”. We can go on adding information. We can even insert a word between the subject and the verb, so we could say, “Whenever he goes to the pub, Robert enthusiastically sings folk songs arranged by his brother”, and on and on and on.

So in order to add variety and rhythm to your writing, you often want to put in a descriptive phrase or a subordinate clause, such as, “Whenever he goes to the pub”. But being aware of that structure will help you avoid waffling and leading your reader into a tangle of words that he or she will find hard to understand. This video helps one understand the basic structure of a sentence and how one could utilize this structure to write or pass information to another, without confusing them.