verb; sometime it follows by a complement. Compound sentence is a sentence that contains of two or more subject and verbs, since they are made of two or more simple
sentences and joined by punctuations, conjunctive adverbs, or coordinate conjunctions. The last is complex sentence, it consist of a simple sentence and several
phrases. The phrases are not sentences because they are not express complete thought.
There are four steps in understanding sentences Mc Whorter, 1989: 86:
a. Identifying Key Ideas
Every sentence expresses at least one key idea or basic message that is made up of a subject and a predicate Mc Whorter 1989: 86. There are two questions
considered to find out the key idea of a sentence; 1 Who or what is the sentence about? 2 What is happening in the text?
For example: John studied for three hours last night.
Who What
In the example above, the underlined words, John and studied are the key ideas. The subject of this sentence is John. It tells who the sentence is about. The
predicate in this sentence is studied. It tells what John did last night for three hours. It was happening for the subject.
b. Locating Details
The next step is to see how details affect its meaning. McWhorter 1989:88 suggests the readers to consider about the object or predicate such as what, where,
which, when, how, and why questions about the subject and predicate. For example:
Samin drove his car to Yogyakarta last month.
What Where When
The underlined words are parts of this sentence. These parts give information about the predicate by asking
“What did Samin drive?” Where did Samin drive? and “When did Samin drive?”
c. Combining Ideas Into a Sentence
According to McWhorter 1989:89, “a sentence always expresses one idea”.
However, some sentences may express more than one idea. Two or more complete ideas can be built into or combined into one sentence.
For example: Some students decided to take the final, but others choose to write a paper
S V
S V
This sentence consists of two ideas. They are “some students decided” and
“others choose”. The ideas of the sentence above are connected with a comma. According to McWhorter 1989:89,
“there are two ways to combine two ideas into a single sentence
”. 1
Two ideas may be connected with a comma and a connecting word. Such as: and, but, or, nor, so, for, yet.
Example: television is entertaining, and it is educational. 2
Two ideas may also be joined using a semicolon. Example: television is entertaining; it is also educational.
McWhorter 1989:89-90
d. Reading Complicated Sentence
