Hey everyone welcome back to my channel this is Dori I am a teacher of
English
and today we're going to talk about how to write
complex sentences as you know in your
writing you're asked to write complex sentences and this is really
important
for your IELTS marking. The thing is that most of
you try to write in a complex way but
this eventually comes against you because you end up making
too many mistakes. So, if you are not 100% sure
that what you're writing is correct then
better not to write it all better be simple than sorry right
however, today I'm going to show you how to write
complex sentences and be correct
at the same time first things first
what do we mean by saying a simple sentence
a simple sentence is a sentence that consists
of the subject the person that does something
and a verb for example
Mary the subject and "is" the verb
another example
the dog the subject and ate the verb
okay that's it! these are just simple
sentences that are made up
by a verb and a subject. These sentences can totally stand on their own
that's why we call them independent because
they don't need anything else! Now, a very important punctuation tip!
when you have two or more simple sentences together
you never use a comma
between them for example if you have
these three sentences
are simple sentences okay you can never
connect them with a comma: this is wrong instead
we use a semi-colon between them
Keep that in mind not only for your IELTS writing but also for your academic studies
Now, what is a compound sentence
again nothing to confuse you: a compound sentence consists
of two or more simple sentences
independent sentences together but
this time they are not connected with a semicolon
but they are connected with another linking
word for example
another example
These connecting
words that connect two simple sentences together in order to form a compound sentence
are called fanboys in grammar because it is very easy for you to remember
them
in this way for example if you put the word fanboys in a vertical
way then you have "for" "and" "nor"
"but" "or" "yet" and "So"
of course there are more linking words that you can use
but these are the most commonly used and it is very easy for you to remember them in
this way now what is a complex
sentence? A complex sentence consists
of a simple sentence again and a
sentence that cannot stand
on its own that is a dependent sentence
okay for example
as you can see in this example Mary
is unhappy can totally stand on its
own but the dependent sentence because the cake
is not tasty cannot stand on
its own it doesn't make sense it needs the simple sentence in order to make sense
right so in a complex sentence simple
and dependent sentences are connected together
with a linking word and usually a comma
These linking words are
there are numerous of them, so let's see another example
Now let's use what we've just learnt in order to make IELTS Task2
level examples. So we will take
random simple sentences together
these could be your notes. For example,
Okay now we can take these
simple sentences and we can make a
single complex sentence for example
So we took our random notes
our simple sentences and we formed
a single complex sentence: we connected
the first two sentences with the word "and" and we made a
compound sentence and then we used
connecting words and made the other two sentences dependent
this is very useful when you have written down ideas
in your notes with reasons and examples and you don't know how to connect them
together in a single paragraph and
of course in a more complex way