Writer’s Corner
Writing Academically: Sentence Control
Sentence control is about being aware enough of the subtle effects of different sentence types that you can use them to control the way your reader takes in information. Sound cool? It is.
Sentence Control
Returning to think about sentence types, possibly for the first time since middle school, is important in a similar way to integrated quotations. It is about becoming more in control of exactly what you’re doing with your writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis. Read back through the paragraph you’re reading right now and you will notice the way it’s constructed. The first three lines are three different sentence types: complex, simple, and compound.
It is about becoming more in control of exactly what you’re doing with your writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis.
Simple sentence: a subject and a verb. In this sentence, the subject and verb are placed in the first two words. “It”, the subject, and “is”, the verb. The rest of the sentence is an extension of those two words and can’t exist without them. That makes it a simple sentence, the same as “The cat sat on the mat”.
Read back through the paragraph you’re reading right now and you will notice the way it’s constructed.
A compound sentence joins two simple sentences together. The most well-known chemical bond between two sentences is “and”, but there are thousands of alternatives. Note how the two parts of the sentence have their own subject-verb pair so you can separate the sentences and they can survive on their own ( “you’re reading” and “you will notice”).
Returning to think about sentence types, possibly for the first time since middle school, is important in a similar way to integrated quotations.
A complex sentence has a main clause and a subordinate clause. The subordinate clause relies on the main clause. You can tell the two clauses apart because if you extract the subordinate clause from the sentence the sentence still makes sense, but the clause doesn’t. I can’t call “Possibly for the first time since middle school” a whole sentence. But “Returning to think about sentence types is important in a similar way to integrated quotations” is a complete sentence. The sentence is more structurally complex than the others – hence the name.
Who cares? How could this possibly help my writing? Should I start using random sentence types to seem like a more varied and interesting writer?
Sentence types guide your reader through a paragraph. They tell the reader which piece of information is important. They tell your reader which information is connected to, or relies on, or supports another piece of information. If you write without knowing how to control that, you’re painting with your fingers when you could be using a brush. You’ll fail to guide your audience from focal point to focal point effectively.
Example
Read the following paragraphs and notice how your focus changes in the different versions.
1.
It was nature and the people living closely to it that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations. In this he was not alone. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art. This was driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city. Many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises. Here they could observe nature firsthand. This allowed them to feed its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside. His early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes. They were rendered in dark, moody tones.
2.
It was nature and the people living closely to it that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations, which he was not alone in, as landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art, because artists were driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city to seek out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work, and Van Gogh himself was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside, and as such his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.
The first paragraph is a series of simple sentences. It starts well but quickly becomes difficult to follow. It becomes rhythmically repetitive, but more importantly, each of those periods is forcing us to stop on the information we’re reading, like a focal point. When every sentence is a focal point, all of the information seems equally valuable, and so its hard to know what’s most important.
The second paragraph is the same text rewritten as a complex compound sentence. We don’t get a chance to stop on any of the information, and it gives us the sense that we’re supposed to treat all of the information as one big piece, rather than lots of connected pieces.
Now read the final version of the paragraph, as it was published by the Museum of Modern Art in an essay about van Gogh called “Emotion, Vision, and a Singular Style”:
It was nature, and the people living closely to it, that first stirred van Gogh’s artistic inclinations. In this he was not alone. Landscapes remained a popular subject in late-nineteenth-century art. Driven in part by their dissatisfaction with the modern city, many artists sought out places resembling earthly paradises, where they could observe nature firsthand, feeding its psychological and spiritual resonances into their work. Van Gogh was particularly taken with the peasants he saw working the countryside; his early compositions featured portraits of Dutch peasants and rural landscapes, rendered in dark, moody tones.
Notice how the writer produces dramatic pauses in the paragraph with simple sentences (“In this he was not alone”) that also tell us that this is an important piece of information to the essay (it’s important to note that van Gogh was not the only person painting landscapes). They also connect key ideas together into causal chains (“Driven by dissatisfaction… many artists sought… where they could observe… feeding into their work”) that allow us to understand how the ideas in the sentences are related to each other and what they add up to mean.
One final note: colon quotations are sort of like compound sentences with a colon instead of an “and”. Integrated quotations are more like simple or complex sentences – the quote just has to fit with whatever type of sentence it all adds up to make.