If you ever want to clear a room, a single word will usually do the trick: grammar. For anyone who had a hypercritical English teacher or a particularly persnickety aunt — and that’s a lot of us — the ...

Letters represent sounds. Words are built from letters. A group of words makes a phrase. Add a subject and verb, and you have a clause. If that clause expresses a complete thought, we call it a ...

A dependent clause cannot stand alone, though they often contain both a subject and a verb. Where independent clauses express complete thoughts, dependent clauses do not, and left on their own, ...

A simple sentence, also known as a main clause, shows one clear idea. It has one subject (what or who) and one verb (a doing word). Scott struggles through the snow. A compound sentence joins two ...

Writers choose and build different types of sentences carefully. There are three main types of sentence structure - simple close simple sentenceA sentence containing one clause made up of a subject ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

Two weeks ago, I suggested the following sentence reconstruction to Young Mentor, a member of Jose Carillo’s English Forum who sought advice on how to improve a letter he was writing: ...