ABSTRACT

Common Core Language Standard 3.1 calls for students to “produce simple, compound, and complex sentences” (Common Core Standards, 2010) as part of a broader standard that requires students to demonstrate command of grammatical conventions. These three sentence types provide variation in writing, as they differ in their structures, effects, and amounts of detail. To understand the differences among these three sentence types, it’s important to grasp a fundamental concept: the independent clause. An independent clause is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought. For example, “The lions rested” is an independent clause; lions is the subject and rested is the verb. The independent clause is the starting point for thinking about the differences among simple, compound, and complex sentences because all three sentence types contain at least one independent clause-the differences lie in what else the sentences contain. Let’s explore each sentence type in more detail.