Whatever you read or write, or talk about, you will meet sentences. Schools pay attention to sentence construction as a basic skill for writing and reading.
Sentences can be as short as two words, or as long as sixty or eighty words or more (even in literature for children). They can have a simple or a complicated structure. Learning about the simple subject-verb-object ‘doing’ sentence is a good place to start. How do we then get from there to understanding the more varied and complicated sentences that are found in different contexts?
The good news is that there is method in the grammar. Sentences work according to some basic principles and patterns. There is one basic pattern for all sentences. Then there are systematic ways of working with that pattern to say exactly what we want to say . One underlying pattern; principled ways of adapting it to build any sentence. So while we do want to learn specific sentence types, it helps to also have the added understanding of how sentence building works. This is a key to making easier sense of varied and complicated sentences, whether in writing or reading.
It is part of moving from unconscious knowledge of language patterns to practical ‘syntactic awareness’.
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