Grammar - Clauses

Pizza is a food that nearly everyone enjoys because there are unlimited variations of this meal. You can use a tomato sauce, a pesto sauce, or—if you like white pizza—no sauce at all.

You can top it with a variety of vegetables, spices, meats, and even fruits.

You can sprinkle or dollop an array of different cheeses, including hard cheeses, soft cheeses, or dairy-free cheeses.

The crust can be whole-wheat, gluten-free, thin-crust, or stuffed-crust; some crusts are even vegetable-based.

Sentences are like pizza.

If you find yourself scratching your head trying to understand how sentences are similar to pizzas, take a look at the variety of sentences on this page. Some are short and straightforward. Others are long and complex. It would be boring if all pizzas were made with the same ingredients, and it would also be boring if all sentences had the same grammar constructions. Clauses help to vary sentence structures so that they are not monotonous but interesting. In this topic, you will learn how to use the two main types of clauses: dependent and independent. Using different types of clauses will help you add variety and "flavor" to your writing.

Essential Questions

• How can you combine closely related independent clauses to create a compound sentence?
• How do dependent clauses function in sentences?