Lesson video

Hello, and welcome to your English lesson.

I'm Miss Gayle, and I'm going to be a teacher for this unit of work on grammar for writing.

In this lesson, we will be reviewing some call grammatical rules and practising our writing to try to maximise the clarity of our communication.

Take a moment to clear any distractions away and make sure you have everything you need at hand.

Now write down today's title, grammar for writing sentence construction.

You probably have been getting used to writing incomplete grammatical sentences since you were around five years old and speaking using them for much longer.

So for many of you, you might feel confident that when you construct a sentence you've mastered the essential grammar that sits behind it.

Let's start with a quick reminder of some of the fundamentals of sentence construction.

You might think that these rules are basic, but they're the building blocks of everything that you read, write and understand, and it's easy to make mistakes.

So refreshing your memory is never a bad thing.

So here's a reminder of some of the fundamental rules.

A sentence must begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop, exclamation mark or question mark.

A complete sentence must make sense on its own and should contain a subject who or what the sentence is about and the verb or predicate.

Like the action, state or occurrence being carried out or experienced.

A sentence usually has an object who or what the action is done to.

There are different types of sentences, simple, compound and complex.

And these are different configurations of clauses that have their own use and function.

So let us take a quick quiz on some foundations of the essentials that you need to know.

Remember grammar is the toolkit that allows you to turn your thoughts into coherent ideas so that you can communicate with others.

So firstly, what must all sentences start with, As you hopefully learned back in primary school, all sentences must start with a capital letter and sometimes they slip away from our writing when we're in a hurry.

So make sure you remember.

While this is a rule that most people know it is one that loads of people forget.

So it's constantly worth reminding yourself to check.

How do you know when a sentence you've written is complete? Well, in actual fact, you check all these things.

A complete sentence must have a subject, object and predicate or verb, and it should make sense on its own.

It does not necessarily have to end with the full stop since you might be writing an exclamatory or interrogative sentence, which could end the question Mark or an exclamation Mark, but you do need a terminal piece of sentence filtration at the end, whether that's a full stop, an exclamation Mark or a question mark.

What is the subject of a sentence.

Well, then the subject of a sentence is who or what the sentence is about.

If you were say the sentence, the girl is watching the video, the subject of the sentence will be the girl who is doing the action.

She is what the sentence is about.

As we get better at our technical accuracy and understanding of the basic rules of punctuation.

We can start to craft our sentences more deliberately for clarity and cohesion as we express our ideas.

And you've probably been asked numerous times by your teachers at school to use a variety of different sentence structures in your writing.

Imagine you've been asked to describe the image on your screen.

I lovely autumn seeing the sun beaming down through the yellowing leaves.

What might you describe, take a moment to note down any words or phrases that come to your mind as you look at the image, what do you notice about this description? Having read it independently and then we'll think about some of the key things you might want to improve in a redraft of this paragraph.

So, is this paragraph any good? What did you notice about it? I absorbed my surroundings.

The birds were singing.

The sky was blue.

The clouds drifted overhead.

Trees swayed in the breeze.

A dog was barking.

It was a warm afternoon.

Now the paragraph, although it contains some descriptive details and clearly attempts to think about vocabulary choices and is accurate to the basic rules of grammar.

It's not particularly inspiring when it comes to crafting sentence variety for maximum impact on the reader.

So it reads a little like a list.

Each sentence has about four words.

And by the end of the paragraph, these feels slightly clunky and monotonous.

Sentence variety is important because it helps to engage the reader with a balance of detail, attention, grabbing short sentences, longer explanatory sentences, and clear and functional sentences everywhere in between.

So in the example on your screen, you can see that that's not really happening.

Just pause to add to your notes.

Why sentence variety in your writing is important.

Well done.

Using a variety of sentence links and structures in your writing helps to engage your reader and craft your ideas while embedding greater detail.

And that's the key to what our focus is today.

So one way of ensuring that your sentences do have sufficient variety, is by ensuring that you include a range of simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences and even sentence fragments.

Let's just remind ourselves of what they are.

A simple sentence contains one main clause.

A main clause makes sense on its own and has one main verb.

So it can stand alone without any additional clauses.

The sentence you can see on your screen is an example of a main clause.

So we've got the subject, a simple sentence, the verb contains, and the object, main clause.

Compound sentences are a little more complex.

They contain more than one main clause and they are joined by a conjunction or by semi-colon in some cases.

Compound sentences can be joined either by semi-colon or by one of the coordinating conjunctions for, and, nor, but, or, yet and so.

The explanation that we've just looked at is an example of a compound sentence.

You can see the first half of the sentence, compound sentences contain more than one main clause could be a sentence on its own.

Equally, the second half of the sentence, they are joined by a conjunction or semi-colon could make sense on its own.

So they're both joined by that conjunction 'and' in this case.

A complex sentence, as you may be aware, contains at least one subordinate clause.

That's a clause that doesn't make sense on its own or is dependent on the rest of the sentence.

And you can see in this example on your screen, the phrase within the commas, as you may be aware is the subordinate clause.

The rest of the sentence makes sense on its own.

A complex sentence contains at least one subordinate clause could stand alone as a simple sentence, but we've added in that extra detail, and extra information between the two commas, making it a complex sentence.

Finally, a fragment looks like a sentence, sounds like a sentence but isn't quite a sentence.

And a fragment sentence is one that looks like a sentence, but it doesn't contain a main independent clause.

So can't stand as a complete thought.

Often a fragment won't have a verb in it.

In writing you might find that the fragment is used often to add to tension or needs or a sense of expectation.

If you look at the example on your screen here.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

Silence, absolute silence.

Those two fragments sentences at the end really emphasise the tension being intended by the writer.

So let's take a quick quiz now to check out understanding of compound, complex and simple sentences.

Identify which is being used in each of the examples you can see.

Are they compound, complex or simple.

Well, then get ready to check your answers now.

The first example is simple.

It contains just one clause.

The second sentence is complex because it contains a subordinate clause, which is the phrase at the start, as well as the main clause.

The third sentence is a compound sentence.

As it contains two main clauses joined by the coordinating conjunction 'so'.

And the fourth sentence is also a compound sentence.

This time joined by the semi-colon.

Well done if you got all those correct.

So let's return now to the scene that we were describing earlier, that lovely autumn day, we're going to make some improvements to the paragraph that we read, thinking about how we can focus on constructing a variety of different sentences to have the maximum impact on our reader.

Remember when you're writing a description, you really want to capture their imagination and transport them to the scene that you described and to do that, we need to make sure that we're not being dull and monotonous, but we're really crafting effective sentences.

As we can see, all of these sentences are simple sentences, as well as being roughly the same length.

Here's some of the things you might try if you were going to try and improve this paragraph, remember sentence variety, avoids monotony.

Have we achieved a variety of different sentence structures here.

Have a quick read through and then we'll talk about what has been achieved.

So in this model, we start with a simple sentence followed by two complex sentences, which allow us to include additional detail.

These are followed by a compound semi-colon sentence and another simple sentence ending with a fragment for emphasis.

So you can see the cooler codes there on your screen, the purple are simple sentences, the light blue complex sentences and the dark blue compound sentences.

The pink there is a fragment.

So we've got a lot of variety and that's enabled us to add additional detail and to engage the reader with more carefully crafted sentence structures.

So it's your turn now to practise that, I want you to try and improve the sentence variety in the paragraph yourselves now.

Think about how we achieved it previously by changing the variety of sentence constructions being used.

Well done.

I'd now like you to highlight and label the different sentence forms you've used.

Are they simple, compound, complex or fragment sentences.

Hopefully you've seen that in your writing, you've managed to include a range of different sentence structures there.

Okay, so you're going to continue the description now.

Remember, like we've said in descriptive writing, your aim is to transport your reader to the world you're trying to create.

So think about how you could appeal to the different senses.

Maybe you could use imagery like similes or metaphors for effect.

Your key focus though, in this piece of writing is to develop your variety of sentence structures.

So I'd like you now to take a moment to plan what you might describe.

You've already got your ideas jotted down from earlier, but I'd like you now to think about three things that you are going to describe inspired by this image, write them down and think about what words or phrases you could use to describe them.

Okay, now it's your turn to write.

You can look back at the model if you wish thinking about how we used complex sentences to add additional detail.

So it's your turn and try and transport the reader to the scene you can see.

Make sure you're checking your work as you go along for accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Think about the sentence types you're using and try to include descriptive imagery and effective vocabulary choices that you think will work well.

Once you've finished your work, I want you to self assess what you've done.

Hopefully you can be really proud of your efforts today.

First check and proof read your work for accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Then highlight and label the sentence types you've used.

Are they simple, compound, complex or fragment.

And do you have a wide range, then underline any descriptive imagery or effective vocabulary choices you think work well.

Well done.

I'm sure both you and your teachers are really proud of what you've done today.

Thank you for your focus.

And I hope you enjoy the rest of your learning today.