If you are a Spanish student of Professional English and you want to learn Multi-Clause sentences you are almost certainly being cheated.
Nearly all text books and student resources will tell you that this is a multi-clause sentence:
“The ship’s maiden voyage had to be postponed as the forecast was so bad.”
Or this:
“Although he works long hours, he always finds time to spend with his family”
Or even this from Grammarly:
“After Troy ate a giant cookie, he got a stomach ache.”
They will tell you something about ‘Clauses’, which you won’t remember, and joining them with a ‘Conjunction’, which will make even less sense, but they won’t tell you why and how you would use long sentences.
This is like preparing someone for a gun fight with a water pistol!
When you try to research the subject it gets even more confusing as the “experts” tend to use terms interchangeably. You will see them referred to as “Compound” and “Complex” but you will rarely be presented with the kind of sentences you will need to read, understand, and write in the work place.
If you plan to work in industry, you might need to read this paragraph:
“Another design function is to calculate, indentify and specify the numerous Safety Critical Elements (SCE) that exist on the jacket, the platform modules and in all the systems and sub-systems. A SCE is any part or parts of an offshore installation the failure of which, would cause or substantially contribute to a major incident, or a component the purpose of which is to prevent or limit the effect of a major incident.”
This is from a peer reviewed published paper:
“To verify this eventuality, we measured the WAXS maps of linen samples before and after exposure to a temperature of 200 C in an oven for half an hour, without any control of the relative humidity, which became very low during the fabric’s exposure at these temperatures, as happens in accidental fires.”
What the “experts” don’t tell you is that we communicate in packets of information and it is often useful to bunch interrelated information together. The trick is to control how that information is presented to the listener or reader.
In many ways language is like music, a complex symphony, and punctuation is like the percussion section: each symbol has its own weight or time value.
At Libertad Communications we give you a safe space to learn the rhythm and music of real multi-clause sentences. In our workshops you will learn:
- Working with complex multi-clause sentences
- Changing word order to change meaning
- Information sequence and paragraphing
- The music of punctuation
Contact us to see when we are running our famous Foundation Course.