When teachers try to explain how English sentences work, they usually make it way too complicated. I’m going to give you the short and easy version.
There are basically four types of sentences in English:
1) complete sentence
–> eg: I like cheese.
A complete sentence has to have a subject (a noun) and a verb. It may also have some other words to complete the thought of the verb.
2) complete sentence + complete sentence
–> eg: I like cheese, but my brother likes ham.
You need to use one of the seven “fanboys” (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) to connect two complete sentences. There are no other words that can be used to connect two complete sentences.
3) 
–> eg: I like cheese because I am a cheesy person.
The incomplete sentence (“because I am a cheesy person”) can’t stand on its own. It needs to be “hooked” onto the complete sentence (“I like cheese”).
Why is “because I am a cheesy person” an incomplete sentence? It’s because the word because is a “subordinator.” A subordinator is a word that makes a sentence incomplete.
There are a LOT of subordinators in English. Some common ones are: although, even though, since, so that, when, while, before, while, whenever, if, unless, whether, as.
Additionally, you can put the incomplete sentence before the complete sentence.
–> eg: Because I am a cheesy person, I like cheese. (You need a comma here.)
You can also put the incomplete sentence in the middle of the complete sentence.
–> eg: I, because I am a cheesy person, like cheese. (You need two commas here.)
4) complete sentence + complete sentence
^ incomplete sentence
–> eg: I like cheese because I am a cheesy person, but my brother likes ham.
Sentence type 4 is just a combination of sentence types 2 and 3.
Additionally, you can move the complete and incomplete sentences around:
–> eg: Because I am a cheesy person, I like cheese, but my brother likes ham.
You can also keep adding more and more complete and incomplete sentences.
–> eg: I like cheese because I am a cheesy person, but my brother likes ham because he is a hammy person.
–> eg: I like cheese because I am a cheesy person, but my brother likes ham because he is a hammy person, although I don’t really know what that means. (This sentence is kind of long, but the grammar is technically correct.)
Next post: Other types of incomplete sentences.
Stephanie Teaches 
Well done! It’s sometimes difficult to explain English sentence structure easily to ESL students. I try and think of ways to help my students understand the grammar. If I’m teaching a unit on sentence structure, I’ll put up a sentence in the incorrect word order and have my students read it aloud. Then, I’ll ask if that sounded correct or not. When they say, “no”, I’ll ask why and see if they can figure out the mistake before I tell them. Sometimes they get it, other times they don’t. Teaching grammar and writing is a long-term process that’s often frustrating because the results don’t happen quick enough, or are barely noticeable.
Thank you! That’s a great exercise to get the students to think about and work on grammar themselves. Sometimes when I teach grammar, especially to students who hate it or think they don’t need it, I call it “leveling up your writing/speaking” or maybe “helping you understand difficult readings/listening.” They still know it’s grammar, but it helps keep the complaints down!
Reblogged this on So, You Think You Can Teach ESL? and commented:
This is a great post that explains an easy way to teach English sentence structure! Check it out.
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Nice post!
Yes, that sentence is grammatically correct but kind of long. but I think it’s better to separate our sentence to convey our thoughts well 🙂
I just want to ask if there is a standard for the number of sentences allowed in a sentence?
My apologies for taking so long to reply! For some reason the notification for you comment went to my junkmail folder.
I think maybe three sentences is about as long as I can take. Anything longer and I start to get confused!
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