What is the difference between a sentence and a clause? The answer has quite a practical purpose, and can help us immensely in revising our work efficiently. Imagine, for example, that you’ve written this sentence and you’re not quite sure you’ve gotten it right: There’s the woman who everybody thinks is going to be the …
Tag Archives: Clauses
From Phrase to Clause
Let’s say you’ve found yourself in an unworkable sentence, something like this, for example: One month into my vacation after not taking any time off for almost three years, I began to experience persistent thoughts about being away from work that plagued me. If we have agreed, as I think we should, that anything goes …
A Clause Versus a Phrase
Though it might offend our pride to realize, not everything we have to say is as important as we might think. We draw breath to speak a simple sentence because a thought has occurred to us, but that one thought doesn’t live alone; it takes its life along with other thoughts, some only half expressed, …
Clause by Clause
What are we to do with a sentence like this: You were sitting next to the person whom everybody thinks will be the next president of the corporation. Or is it who everybody thinks? It’s a perfect example of how practically important it can be to train your eye to see clauses first when grammatical …
Skeletons in the Clause
We seem to have been blessed or cursed (take which perspective you will) with two opposing forces in our human nature: the creative, which allows all things to be, and the analytical, which examines all comers for their propriety and fitness. We see this in writing, of course, in the two very different frames of …