WEEK 3 - Writing Expository Essays

1. Reading Skill 3: Paraphrasing meaning of the sentences

2. Reading Skill 4: Connecting Information of a passage

3. Writing Skill: Creating simple, compound, and complex sentences

There are three kinds of sentences: simple sentence, compound sentence, and complex
sentence. Simple sentence is a sentence which is usually short, has a subject and a
verb or predicate, and has one complete thought.
Compound sentence is a sentence made up of two clauses or complete sentences but they are
connected with a conjuction such as “and,but, or”. Compound sentence is good in combining
two ideas in a sentence but sometimes it doesn’t strongly reflects the connection or the
realtionship between those two ideas. The word "and,“ in the 1st example, only adds one idea
of going to school, but the readers have no idea how “waking up” and “going to school” are
related.

A complex sentence is made up of an independent clause and one or more dependent clauses
connected to it. A dependent clause is similar to an independent clause, or complete sentence,
but it lacks one of the elements that would make it a complete sentence.

Examples of dependent clauses:

because Lily and Lani are afraid.

while she is waiting for her boyfriend.

before you eat.

These dependent clauses have 1 subject and 1 verb, however they can’t stand by itself as a
whole sentence because the idea is not complete yet.

A comprehension of a reading text can be also seen from the paraphrasing and connecting
information skills. In paraphrasing, you should break the complex sentence down into parts.
Looking at the punctuation and transitional words can be a good strategy to do. Then,
inserting sentence in the correct place based on the context can be done by looking at the
main idea, referent, connectors, transitional words. After acquiring the reading skills, writing
sentences to be a good composition is also needed. Therefore, three kinds of sentences such
as simple sentence, compound sentence, and complex sentence were introduced in this
section.