Posts Tagged ‘subordinate clauses’
Punctuation is important. It is an essential part of the signaling system of language and is central to effective communication – as well as to the passing of exams. A lot of people, however, make an awful mess of punctuation, which means that their performance in essays suffers and that they fail to do themselves justice.
The question mark, unlike the exclamation mark, is essential, and something you must take care to include when it is required:
Did Napoleon represent a real threat to Britain?
Whenever you ask a direct question in your ... Read more...
Tags: effective communication, exclamation mark, long sentence, punctuation, question mark, question the question, sentences, signaling system, subordinate clauses, word question
Posted in English Basics |
There are only a few questions that you need to ask yourself. Have I written a sentence? Do I need a compound sentence? Do I need subordinate clauses? Have I produced all these elements in accordance with the rules? Does my sentence make sense and read well? Beyond the individual sentence, however, is the logic of a paragraph, where we need to be more Ware of how each sentence as a unit combines in a larger pattern. The ore we are in control of building an argument, the more we are going to be control of the argument in an essay. This might be more apparent if we look again at the paragraph we have been discussing as the student initially wrote it and then at the revised version:
The creation of the city of Philadelphia, and the colony of Pennsylvania at the same time, by William Penn, is often referred to as his ‘Holy Experiment’. He wanted to create a place where anyone could live, I without fear. It was the first place of its... Read more...
Tags: american colonies, paragraph, proposal, sentences, simple sentence, subordinate clauses, topic sentence
Posted in Featured, Writing |
Can you see anything wrong with this paragraph?
The risk of damnation is made clear in Kyd’s “The Spanish Tragedy” by the use of a ghost from hell, called Revenge, who acts as a chorus to the play. This provides a formal framework which contrasts with the violent actions of the characters. There’s also something rather spooky about a ghost.
If you feel that the last sentence struck the wrong note, it is because the word ‘spooky’ is inappropriate. But why? Isn’t it a perfectly good word? It probably is, but the problem is that it’s an informal word, the kind of word that might be used in conversation, but which jars with the formal tone required in an essay. You might also feel that it is a rather lightweight word. Up until that point the writer has achieved a good level of analysis, but the final sentence unintentionally trivializes the subject For a moment the writer takes his/her eye off the topic and makes a rather vague, colloquial point. It is important in writing an essay to strive for a fairly formal tone. Contractions such as didn’t, wasn... Read more...
Tags: dictionary, Essay Writing, paragraph, phrase search, phrases, subordinate clauses, thesaurus, writing an essay
Posted in Essay Writing, Writing |
It is useful to think of the first sentence of a paragraph as the ‘topic’ sentence. In our revised version of the letter, the topic sentence is: David was not able to attend school yesterday. It is effective as an opening because it is such a controlled, almost declamatory, statement. Most essays can start in a similar way: you can create an initial dramatic and arresting effect by having a simple sentence that stands alone, not tangled up in subordinate clauses and details. Look, for example, at these opening sentences from students’ essays:
Modern poetry is disturbing and problematic.
Modem poetry, by which we mean poetry produced roughly between 1910 and 1930, falls into various categories, of which the most original is probably that referred to as ‘modernist’, in particular T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land.
There is nothing actually wrong with the second example here, but it does not create any great expectation that we are going to encounter an interesting essay. Rather, it is going to be an essay loaded with facts, crowded in at every comma. The first example, by contra... Read more...
Tags: great expectation, oxford english dictionary, paragraph, punctuation, sentences, simple sentence, students essays, subordinate clauses, topic sentence, Write Topic Sentences
Posted in Writing |
