21 January 2016

*SENTENCE COMBINATION*

Learning to combine ideas into more complex sentences is an important writing skill. There are many ways to do this. Try to combine the following three sentences. Do not use a semi-colon.

Sentence 1: The snow lay heavily on the ground.
Sentence 2: People were shoveling the driveways and sidewalks.
Sentence 3: There was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.

3 comments:

Leah said...


People were shoveling the driveways and sidewalks, but there was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.
Leah Eng 140

Leah said...

My Original post was missing an entire sentence due to a copy and paste error. :(
Proper answer: As the snow lay heavily on the ground, people were shoveling the driveways and sidewalks. As such, there was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.
Leah Eng 140

Michael said...

Good try, Leah. But you wrote two sentences, not one.

In this case, a few simple coordinating conjunctions might suffice:

The snow lay heavily on the ground, and people were shoveling the driveways and sidewalks, but there was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.

Otherwise, you might try to use a relative pronoun:

Although people were shoveling the snow, which lay heavily on the ground, from the driveways and sidewalks, there was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.

Or you could even make the first sentence into a modifier:

Although people were shoveling the heavy snow from the driveways and sidewalks, there was little traffic on the roads until the plows had cleared the major routes.