Firstly, a sentence needs a capital letter at the beginning and a punctuation mark at the end, like a full stop (.), a question mark (?) or an exclamation mark (!). A sentence also needs a verb in it and it must make complete sense all on its own.

Now you need to learn how to combine parts of speech to form your sentence. A sentence has a subject (the person, place or thing that the sentence is about) and an action (what the subject is doing). Together, they express a complete thought.

To structure sentences well, begin by stating the subject, avoid the passive voice, and focus on clarity. Avoid writing sentences that only express partial thoughts or that join too many ideas together.

To build sentences, you can use an independent clause by itself or combine it with a subordinating clause, another independent clause, or both. We explain four sentence structures below.