Skip to Main Content
OASIS Writing Skills

Video Transcripts:
Structuring Sentences: Types of Sentences

Transcripts for Writing Center videos

Structuring Sentences: Types of Sentences

Last updated 6/9/2016

 

Visual: Walden logo at bottom of screen along with notepad and pencil background.

Audio: Guitar music.

 

Visual: “Walden University Writing Center. Your writing, grammar, and APA experts” appears in center of screen. Background changes to a keyboard on a table, and the title “Structuring Sentences: Types of Sentences.”

Slide changes a slide with the header “Types of Sentences”. Below is the following text:

  • Simple
  • Compound
  • Complex  
  • Compound-Complex

Audio: There are different types of sentences. And we're going to briefly go through them. These are more for your information than anything else. But you can use simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences, or compound-complex sentences. And I'm going to give a brief description of all of these.

 

Visual: Slide changes to include the header “Types of Sentences.” Below is the following text:

  • Simple: Made up of an independent clause
  • He performed research.
  • Compound: Made up of two or more independent clauses.
  • He performed the research, and he won an award for his strong work.

*Sentence type definitions adapted from Purdue OWL.

Audio: So, a simple sentence is just an independent clause. It's just one independent clause that stands by itself. A compound sentence is where you have more than one independent clause together. You might have, "He performed the research, and he won an award for his strong work." You have two complete sentences, two independent clauses combined together, and that is a compound sentence.

 

Visual: Slide changes to the header “Types of Sentences”. Below is the following text:

  • Complex: Made up of an independent clause and one or more dependent clauses.
  • Although he has never been a good student in high school, he graduated from university summa cum lade
  • Compound-Complex: Made up of two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.
  • The rain was falling, and the weather was cold though it was supposed to be spring.

Audio: Complex means that you have one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses in the sentence. So we have the sentence "Although he had never been a good student in high school, he graduated from university summa cum laude." To make up the complex sentence, we have our independent clause, "he graduated from university summa cum laude," and we have our dependent clause, "Although he had never been a good student in high school."

Compound-complex is where you have two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses. So here we are giving you examples of how you can combine your phrases and clauses, specifically our clauses together, to create different varieties of sentences.

It's not necessarily important that you can label which is a compound sentence or which is a complex sentence. But it is important to know that you can combine clauses and phrases in these ways so that you can use these different types of sentences in your writing to be as clear as possible and vary your writing in a way that makes it engaging for your reader.

 

Visual: “Walden University Writing Center. Questions? E-mail writingsupport@mail.waldenu.edu.”