Losing sight of your main idea – Using punctuation, adding subordinating conjunctions, and tacking on streams of dependent clauses, you fall in love with making ever-longer sentences that crush the soul of your intent. When crafting your sentences, be careful to avoid traps with complex sentences. Kafka was a master of language he had unwritten permission (from generations of readers) to violate all the “rules” of writing. Whether we liked it or not, we lost by many runs. While on vacation, we can do whatever we like.Įxamples of adverb clauses working as dependent clauses in complex sentences might be:Īlthough we played well, we lost the baseball game. Whoever added the eraser to a pencil was very clever. The apartment that felt drafty even in spring needed remodeling.Įxamples of noun clauses working as dependent clauses in complex sentences might be: The thief who had taken the pony was found guilty by the jury. If left by themselves, dependent clauses are sentence fragments.Įxamples of adjective clauses working as dependent clauses in complex sentences might be: If all Kafka had written was, “No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side,” you would have no idea what was happening to Gregor Samsa. These examples have nouns and verbs, but they are not complete thoughts. If I were to try that with my boss, I’d be thrown out on the spot.īecause the lodgers sometimes also took their evening meal at home in the common living room, the door to the living room stayed shut on many evenings. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. In these sentences penned by Kafka, the dependent clauses are underlined: Things certainly are not going well for Kafka’s protagonist because Gregor Samsa has turned into a “monstrous verminous bug.” Dependent clausesĭependent clauses, also called the subordinate clause, have a noun and verb but fail to express a complete thought. Just have patience for a short moment! Things are not going so well as I thought. Here is a wonderful succession of simple sentences (each an independent clause) from Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis: Independent clauses can be complete sentences on their own. In writing, entire ideas expressed using a noun and verb (a subject and predicate) create independent clauses. They are dividing clauses from one another, yet conveying what Baxter likes and dislikes.Complex sentence definition Independent clauses Wodehouse has given an excellent example of the use of semicolons in this passage.
SEICOLON FRAGMENT DEFINITION FULL
“The air was full of the scent of growing things strange, shy creatures came and went about him…But Baxter had temporarily lost his sense of smell he feared and disliked the strange, shy creatures the nightingale left him cold and the only thought the towering castle inspired in him was that it looked as if a fellow would need half a ton of dynamite to get into it.” For example, the author talks about two categories of children, in two separate clauses. Here, semicolons highlight the relationship between two clauses.
Some of the older women never pass without a friendly greeting, never pass, indeed, if it seems that they will be able to engage me in conversation other women look down or look away or rather contemptuously smirk.” “There are the children who make those delightful, hilarious, sometimes astonishingly grave overtures of friendship in the unpredictable fashion of children other children, having been taught that the devil is a black man, scream in genuine anguish as I approach. Example #4: Stranger in the Village (by James Baldwin) All are independent clauses, but semicolons join them together through a common idea. The author has used semicolons twice in this example. It’s my opinion, having attended one of these colleges myself, that of those professors who were insane, the demographics broke down something like this: one third had always been insane one third had been professors at other, better colleges, where they went insane and were sent down to the minors and the final third were just insane people faking their professor-ness.” “Part of the appeal of going to a small, not-so-good college is that a certain percentage of the professors are quite insane, and therefore colorful.
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