Transformation of Sentences — Simple, Compound & Complex — Activity

Two short facts sitting side by side on a page — the lawyer was tired, and he kept working — say almost nothing about how those facts relate to each other. Join them with ‘but’ and a contrast appears. Join them with ‘although’ at the front and the sentence starts making an argument instead of a list. Nothing about the underlying facts has changed; only the grammar joining them has. That single move — changing the joint, not the content — is the entire skill this topic tests, and it is one of the most mechanically learnable topics in the whole paper.

In two minutes

A simple sentence has one subject and one finite verb; a compound sentence joins two or more such sentences with a coordinating conjunction as equals; a complex sentence turns one of them into a subordinate clause dependent on the other — and transformation means moving the same content between these three forms without changing what actually happened in the sentence.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of English – II on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.