EFL / ESL Grammar Series
A straightforward guide to English sentence structure — with only a few rules to remember.
Grammar is complicated, especially when you are first learning it. Simply Sentences is designed to make things as easy to understand as possible. This mini-course focuses is on sentence parts and structure.
The rules and explanations in each lesson are useful, but they are not as important as the example sentences. Our brains are great at recognizing patterns — even when we don't fully understand the "why" behind them. Reading these sentences again and again will help you see the patterns of basic English sentence structure.
In this approach, we do not look for the subject and verb first, but last. Identifying the subject and verb in long sentences can be difficult. Instead, the first step is to identify everything that cannot be the subject or verb. Once we've done that, what's left is the subject and verb — the heart of the sentence.
But first, we'll look at the parts of speech (again, the examples are more important than the explanations). We do that so that we can later identify word groupings like full subjects, full objects, prepositional phrases, and verbals.
Finally, we'll look at three types of sentences: Action, Descriptive, and Hybrid.
Throughout these lessons, sentence parts are highlighted with consistent colors so you can spot patterns at a glance.
Each lesson builds on the last. Work through them in order, or jump to any topic using the links below or the menu at the top of the page.