Putting ideas together

Sentences are made up of ideas. At its most simple level, a sentence can have just one idea, for example:

We cannot grant your request.

With such a sentence the reader probably expects to know why the request cannot be granted. This is a related idea that is best placed in the same sentence.

We cannot grant your request because we have no funds left in this year's budget for this kind of expenditure.

It is not as effective to convey this idea in two sentences:

• We cannot grant your request.
• We have no funds left in this year's budget for this kind of expenditure.

This leaves out the relationship between the two ideas and forces readers to work it out for themselves by guessing about the relationship. A good sentence shows the relationship between the parts clearly by using the correct joining words. On the other hand, if a sentence uses a joining word incorrectly, it can change the entire meaning of the sentence.

If a sentence has two ideas of equal importance closely enough related to be in the same sentence, you need a joining or coordinating word (also known as a coordinate conjunction) that will keep them equal. Below is a list of coordinating words.

In most cases, however, we want to make one sentence the main idea and join it to a related but subordinate or less important idea. For this job you need different joining or subordinating words. Below is a list of some of these words divided into different categories.

You can create good sentences by working out how the various ideas relate to each other, selecting your main idea, and choosing an appropriate way of putting the ideas together to reflect their relationship. If there isn't a relationship between the ideas, don't put them in the same sentence.

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