Monday, March 7, 2011

Who Is That Character?

I decided I want to talk about sentences on today's blog.  So what is a sentence?    I have always thought you had to have a noun and a verb to have a sentence.  You can make sentences simple or compound with multiple clauses.

During critiquing of writings, I have come across a list of words with periods after them.  When I see a period I think there should be a sentence in front of it not a single word.  I am not talking about the alphabet going down the page with a period after each letter.  An example would be a conversation between two people that goes like this:

"I have missed you."
"Yeah, I know."
"A lot."    Is this a sentence?

Complete sentences have five parts to them. 1.) Capital letter   2.) Subject
3.)Predicate    4.) Complete thought  5.) Terminal Punctuation.

Everyone who writes knows the first letter of a sentence is Capitalized.

A predicate of a complete sentence is the action that is going on in the sentence. In other words, a verb shows action, a predicate is a how the verb is used in the sentence.

A sentence requires a complete thought.  It can't stop midway.  An example would be The car drove.  To be a complete sentence the thought process as to be completed.  The care drove itself down the highway.

Terminal Punctuation:  What goes at the end of the sentence.  We have a number of those to choose from: periods, comas, question marks, ect.

Complete sentences help us  convey the message we want conveyed to our readers.  We all are in the habit of making little notes and calling it a sentence.  In this day of Twitter, short cuts are used to convey the twitter message.  I don't believe the Twitter style of writing has helped in educating the young people of today, the importance of being able to write a complete sentence, but that's another blog topic.
Video: Write Powerful, elegant sentences    
 http://youtu.be/HZAofDIkjjo
That's my two-cents for today.

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