Student Support Services
Short ‘Mini’ Version:
What is a sentence?
The principle that “All sentences begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop”, though true in most cases, is not sufficient to define an acceptable sentence of English.
1. Here are some examples which we would accept as sentences because they all contain a simple verb or a verbal construction and they all have an acceptable syntactic structure or a series of these:
He wanted to buy a suit.
Go away!
Because he did not have enough money, he had to wait until pay day.
2. The following are all syntactically correct but do not have a complete verb and so form a grey area:
The least said the better.
Once bitten, twice shy.
No entry.
Good morning.
3. These are acceptable sentences:
He will arrive later this afternoon. or
Later this afternoon, he will arrive .
4.
These are not acceptable since the order in which the units combine does not follow an acceptable syntactic pattern or because the utterance does not convey a complete meaning or idea):
He will later this afternoon arrive.
Arrive later this afternoon he will.
He later this afternoon.
It is a good idea not to construct sentences which are too long. Often, one becomes so engrossed in communicating the meaning or series of ideas that the sentence is jumbled or incomplete. The full leaflet gives examples showing constructional and other errors.
Select ‘Study Guides in PDF to print and study’ for the complete version of this resource.
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