IELTS Writing: How to write complex sentences

46

Hey everyone welcome back to my channel this is Dori I am a teacher of

English

and today we're going to talk about how to write

complex sentences as you know in your

writing you're asked to write complex sentences and this is really

important

for your IELTS marking. The thing is that most of

you try to write in a complex way but

this eventually comes against you because you end up making

too many mistakes. So, if you are not 100% sure

that what you're writing is correct then

better not to write it all better be simple than sorry right

however, today I'm going to show you how to write

complex sentences and be correct

at the same time first things first

what do we mean by saying a simple sentence

a simple sentence is a sentence that consists

of the subject the person that does something

and a verb for example

Mary the subject and "is" the verb

another example

the dog the subject and ate the verb

okay that's it! these are just simple

sentences that are made up

by a verb and a subject. These sentences can totally stand on their own

that's why we call them independent because

they don't need anything else! Now, a very important punctuation tip!

when you have two or more simple sentences together

you never use a comma

between them for example if you have

these three sentences

are simple sentences okay you can never

connect them with a comma: this is wrong instead

we use a semi-colon between them

Keep that in mind not only for your IELTS writing but also for your academic studies

Now, what is a compound sentence

again nothing to confuse you: a compound sentence consists

of two or more simple sentences

independent sentences together but

this time they are not connected with a semicolon

but they are connected with another linking

word for example

another example

These connecting

words that connect two simple sentences together in order to form a compound sentence

are called fanboys in grammar because it is very easy for you to remember

them

in this way for example if you put the word fanboys in a vertical

way then you have "for" "and" "nor"

"but" "or" "yet" and "So"

of course there are more linking words that you can use

but these are the most commonly used and it is very easy for you to remember them in

this way now what is a complex

sentence? A complex sentence consists

of a simple sentence again and a

sentence that cannot stand

on its own that is a dependent sentence

okay for example

as you can see in this example Mary

is unhappy can totally stand on its

own but the dependent sentence because the cake

is not tasty cannot stand on

its own it doesn't make sense it needs the simple sentence in order to make sense

right so in a complex sentence simple

and dependent sentences are connected together

with a linking word and usually a comma

These linking words are

there are numerous of them, so let's see another example

Now let's use what we've just learnt in order to make IELTS Task2

level examples. So we will take

random simple sentences together

these could be your notes. For example,

Okay now we can take these

simple sentences and we can make a

single complex sentence for example

So we took our random notes

our simple sentences and we formed

a single complex sentence: we connected

the first two sentences with the word "and" and we made a

compound sentence and then we used

connecting words and made the other two sentences dependent

this is very useful when you have written down ideas

in your notes with reasons and examples and you don't know how to connect them

together in a single paragraph and

of course in a more complex way