Griffith English Language Institute
HELP Yourself Resource Transcript: Complex Structures 1
In these videos we look at some of the most common complex structures. Once you have
watched this video and completed its related exercises, you should move on to the other
videos in this section, which focus on relative clauses, participle clauses and noun clauses.
In this video, we will look at the difference between simple and complex sentences
Simple and Complex Sentences
Expert writers use a combination of simple sentences and complex sentences in their texts
for variety. First, we need to be able to identify a simple sentence. Here’s an example:

The students finished their study session.
This sentence consists of a subject, followed by a main verb (finished), followed by an object
(their study session). This SVO structure is common in English.
A simple sentence like this contains just one independent clause. It is called ‘independent’
because it is not dependent on anything else; it makes sense (and is complete) by itself.
Now let’s add a dependent clause to the independent clause:

The students finished their study session because they were tired.
‘Because they were tired’ is not the main idea of this sentence and it is not grammatically
complete by itself. It is ‘dependent’ on the first clause. Imagine if a friend walked up to you
and only said “because they were tired”. That wouldn’t make sense by itself, would it? A
complex sentence has both an independent and a dependent clause. Notice how each
clause has its own verb in a tense.
Let’s look at another example of a simple sentence:

Traditionally, the various branches of cognitive science have viewed the mind as an
abstract information processor.
This one is longer and more complicated than our first example but it is still a simple
sentence, with an independent clause. Can you identify the subject, main verbs and object of
this sentence? We could add more information to this sentence - like this - to make it a
complex sentence:
Here “whose connections to the outside world were of little theoretical importance” is the
dependent clause. Can you identify the verb in this dependent clause?
Let’s practise this. Try to identify the dependent clauses and their verbs in these complex
sentences. You can pause the video if you need to. Did you get them right?
As you can see, independent clauses can come at the beginning, middle, or end of a
sentence, depending on the type of sentence. Sometimes commas can help you find them.
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Griffith English Language Institute
Complex Sentences
There are many types of complex sentences. They may contain words such as if, while,
although, since, because, (and) however (called subordinating conjunctions), or words such
as who, what, which, that, (or) whose (called relative pronouns). Watch the other videos in
this section to learn more about these.
Remember - you will rarely come across a paragraph in academic writing that consists only
of simple sentences, or only of complex sentences. Good writers use a variety of simple and
complex sentences to join ideas together, and to improve their flow of writing.
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