杨桃Sentence Development.doc

Sentence Development The goal of this lecture is to enable you to see the stylistic choices available to you as you fashion and revise your sentences. The fundamental unit of composition is the sentence. Every sentence has a shape, and once you can recognize the shape of a sentence, you can recast it to make it more graceful, logical and emphatic. Concentrate your efforts in early drafts on your thesis, the development of your important supporting points, and the essay’s general organization; then, in a later draft, rework your sentences so that each one is informative and clear. All good writers revise and polish their sentences. We are venturing into grammar, though, not to enter the domain of right and wrong, of correctness and errors, but to help you expand your range of stylistic choices. What is a clause? 分句 A clause is any group of words that contains both a subject and a predicate. Independent clause (also known as a main clause) can stand alone as a sentence. E.g. The most famous revolutionaries of this century have all, in one way or another, offered a vision of a classless society. A dependent (or subordinate) clause is any group of words containing a subject and verb that cannot stand alone as a separate sentence because it depends on an independent clause to complete its meaning. E.g. The most famous revolutionaries of this century have all, in one way or another, offered a vision of a classless society, although most historians would agree that this ideal has never been achieved. How many independent clauses are added to the main clause? Which part can not stand independently? “That” clause relies on the “although” clause, which in turn relies on the main clause. What are the functions of “that” and “although”? Subordinating conjunctions 从属连词 By eliminating them, we could rewrite the sentence to contain three independent clauses: The most famous revolutionaries of this century have all, in one way or another, offered a vision of a classless society