and predicate containing a finite verb.’
More important is what sentences are for:
To make statements
To ask questions
To request or demand action
To express emotion
From a practical standpoint, a sentence should express a single idea, or thoughts related to that idea. It should say something. A popular rule of thumb is that a sentence should be complete in thought and complete in construction. And, from a practical point of view, you will soon find that certain rules must be observed if your sentences are to be clear, unambiguous, logical and interesting to the listener or reader.
That said, you still have plenty of scope to fashion sentences of almost any size and shape.
Here is a sentence: the opening sentence of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719).
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull: he got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznoer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called, nay, we call ourselves, and write our name Crusoe, and so my companions always call me.
Very few novelists today would have the nerve or the skill to begin a novel with a long sentence like that; for apart from its length it is also a skilfully wrought passage: clear, supple, flowing and ultimately riveting. If it were written today it would most likely appear as a paragraph of several sentences:
I was born in York in 1632, of a good family. My father came from Bremen and first settled at Hull, acquired his estate by trading merchandise, and then moved to York. There he met and married my mother, from a well established family in that county named Robinson. I was consequently named Robinson Kreutznoer, but in time my own name and that of our family was anglicised to Crusoe. That’s what we’re now called, that’s how we write our name, and that’s what my friends have always called me.
Defoe’s original is a fairly long sentence by any standards. Now try this sentence for size:
‘But ––– !’
This one appears to defy everything we think we know about sentences, but it is a valid sentence just the same, as you will see when it is placed in its correct context:
Jane turned abruptly from the window and faced him with blazing eyes.
‘Well, you’ve finally done it! You realise we’re all ruined, don’t you? Don’t you!’
‘But –––!’ Harry was squirming. Speechless. He stepped back in an attempt to evade the next onslaught.
It never came. Instead, weeping uncontrollably, Jane collapsed on to the settee.
You can see that ‘But ––– !’, short though it is, quite adequately expresses a response and an action in the context of the middle paragraph (a paragraph can consist of one or more sentences with a common theme). Despite its seeming incompleteness, it is nevertheless a sentence of a kind, although some grammarians would label it a sentence fragment. Here are some more:
Her expression conveyed everything. Disaster. Ruin. Utter ruin.
Three of the four sentences here are sentence fragments. They’re perfectly legitimate, but use them for emphasis only, and with care.
The long-winded sentence
Another kind of sentence, and one to avoid, is seen rather too often. Typically, it is rambling and unclear, usually the result of having too many ideas and unrelated thoughts jammed into it, like this one:
He said that the agreement would galvanise a new sense of opportunity and partnership between the countries and enable them to articulate the targets with regard to inflation, set by economically enlightened governments, which was always of great concern to every family in the European Union.
Would you really bother to try to unravel that sentence? No, life is too short, and that sentence is most likely destined to remain unread, its author’s voice deservedly unheard. That’s the price you pay for writing bad sentences. To demonstrate how the inclusion of irrelevant matter can cloud the intent and meaning of a sentence, consider this example:
Jonathan Yeats, whose family moved to the United States from Ireland in the late 1950s, and who later married a Mormon girl from Wisconsin, wrote the novel in less than three months.
We are bound to ask, what has the novelist’s family to do with his writing a book in record time? Did the Mormon girl help him? Did his marriage inspire him to write like a demon? If not, why mention these facts? By the time we’ve reached the important part of the sentence – the fact that he wrote the book in less than three months – our attention has been ambushed by two extraneous thoughts.
American presidents are notorious for irrelevant rambling. The tradition began, apparently, with President Harding, of whom, when he died in 1923, a wit observed, ‘The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.’ A sample:
I have the good intention to write you a letter ever since you left, but the pressure of things has prevented, speeches to prepare and deliver, and seeing people, make a very exacting penalty of trying to be in politics.
But we must not grieve over Harding when we have former US president George Bush gamely carrying the national flag of gobbledegook:
I mean a child that doesn’t have a parent to read to that child or that doesn’t see that when the child is hurting to have a parent and help out or neither parent there enough to pick the kid up and dust him off and send him back into the game at school or whatever, that kid has a disadvantage.
Well, enough of warnings. The point to remember is that although a sentence may be as long as a piece of string, long sentences may land you in trouble. A good sentence will be no longer than necessary, but this doesn’t mean that you should chop all your sentences to a few words. That would be boring. To keep the reader alert and interested you need variety. If you examine this paragraph, for example, you’ll find a sentence sequence that goes short/long/long/short/medium/long/medium. It’s not meant to be a model, but it aims in the right direction.
When a sentence isn’t a sentence
Here are some constructions that aren’t regarded as ‘proper’ sentences:
Are unable to fill any order within 21 days.
Date for the closing of.
Thinking it an excellent opportunity.
