Complex Sentence Structure In John Brown's 'On February 16'

Chapter 6, Page 85, Paragraph beginning with “On February 16. . .”

This particular paragraph incorporates numerous different sentence structures such as following: simple, complex, and compound. Complex sentence usage in this section is the highest when compared to other sentences. Independent and dependent clauses must be present to identify as a complex sentence. For example Brown writes, “Returning to the shell house that evening, the first varsity boat fell in alongside Tom Bolle’s first freshman boat” (85). Looking through the sentence, the first half before the comma is the dependent clause. The dependent clause follows the comma. Another sentence structure was the simple sentence, that of which is typically short and contains a subject and verb. The sentence Brown uses is “Ulbrickson wasn’t terribly surprised” (85). Ulbrickson is the subject and suprised is the verb. As evident, this sentence is the most simple and shortest in length. Lastly, the example of a compound sentence

In particular, conjunctions are used to begin a sentence一the word “and” was used. Another sentence later on in the paragraph begins with a reference to time, “At the end of the day” (65). Several times, the sentences simply begin with a subject and a verb following the subject. Mainly, this paragraph stands out amongst other paragraphs for the diversity of introducing a sentence, however there are several other key signs of sentence diversity. For one, this paragraph includes the three common types of sentences previously mentioned: simple, compound, and complex. Having a diverse sentence length and structure embellishes the writing piece and allows readers to comprehend the writing more easily. Hyphens and quotes are both also used in this paragraph for even more variety. The hyphen usually adds some additional information that would not have been in the writing