The Four Sentence Structures
The simple sentence is one of the four basic sentence structures. The other structures are the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the compound-complex sentence.
- Simple sentence: I purchased a tour guide and a travel journal at the bookstore.
- Compound sentence: I purchased a tour guide and a travel journal, but the bookstore was out of maps.
- Complex sentence: Because I was planning to visit Tokyo, I purchased a tour guide and a travel journal.
- Compound-complex sentence: While Mary waited, I purchased a tour guide and a travel journal at the bookstore, and then the two of us went to dinner.
Constructing a Simple Sentence
At its most basic, the simple sentence contains a subject and a verb:
- I am running.
- Kelsey loves potatoes.
- Mom is a teacher.
However, simple sentences also can contain adjectives and adverbs, even a compound subject:
- He can follow that path and see the waterfall.
- You and your friends can see the waterfall from the trail.
- I was wearing my navy linen suit, a crisp white shirt, a red tie, and black loafers.
The trick is to look for multiple independent clauses joined by a
coordinating conjunction, a semicolon, or a colon. These are
characteristics of a compound sentence. A simple sentence, on the other
hand, only has a single subject-verb relationship.
As you can see from the above examples, a simple sentence—even with a
lengthy predicate—is still grammatically less complex than the other
types of sentence structures.
