When describing the style of a literary passage, it is often useful to look at the sentence structure through the three basic types of sentence: simple, compound and complex.
A working definition of a simple sentence is ‘a group of words that is grammatically complete and expresses a single proposition’. In spoken English, and in special circumstances like road signs, a single imperative verb (‘Stop!’, ‘Fire!’) can be enough to qualify as a simple sentence. However, in written English the vast majority of simple sentences consist of at least two elements, a subject (S) and a verb (V), as in ‘The doctor (S) smiled (V).’ Note that the verb must be finite, that is, it must be in a form that expresses present, past or future tense: ‘The doctor smiles/smiled/will smile.’ but not ‘The doctor smiling.’
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