3 October 2014

*SENTENCE COMBINATION*

Learning to combine ideas into more complex sentences is an important writing skill. There are many ways to do this. Try to combine the following three sentences.

Sentence 1: Because the price of gasoline has increased so much over the past few years, more people are now using public transport.
Sentence 2Many blame the increase in the cost of gas this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling.
Sentence 3: There always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price of gasoline.

4 comments:

Liudmila said...

More people are now using public transport because the price of gasoline has increased so much over the past few years, and even though there always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price of gasoline, many blame the increase in the cost of gas this week on the upcoming long weekend when many people will be travelling.

Olena140 said...

More and more people are now using public transport because the price of gasoline has increased so much over the past few years; there always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price of gasoline, so many blame the increase in the cost of gas this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling.

This task is the hardest for me. Do you have any website I can go to to practice similar tasks?

Michael said...

Good try, both of you!

Liudmila, I'm not sure about the logical connection with "even though".

Olena, the real challenge is to avoid using a semi-colon to connect your sentences.

I agree that this exercise is a difficult one. To be honest, I'm not aware of any other site that will give you this kind of practice. Of course, you can always write three sentences of your own, and try to combine them.

The key, I think, is to find the logical connection among the different sentences. Once you understand how they work together, it is a relatively simple matter to find the language to link them.

In this case, the second and third sentences have an opposing relationship (many excuses versus a particular explanation). Such opposition can be conveyed by the conjunction "but":

There always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price of gasoline, but many blame the increase this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling.

Or we can use "while":

While there always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price of gasoline, many blame the increase this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling.

Or we can reverse the order:

While many (may/will) blame the increase in the cost of gas this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling, there always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price.

Then we just need to figure out how the first sentence fits into this thought.

The key here, I think, is the repetition of "the price of gasoline". Such repetitions provide an opportunity to insert a relative pronoun ("who", "that", "which", etc.) as our linking word:

While many may blame the increase in the cost of gas this week on the upcoming long weekend, when many people will be travelling, there always seems to be one excuse or another for raising the price -- which has increased so much over the past few years that more people are now using public transport.

Olena140 said...

Michael, this comment was SO HELPFUL! Thank you. I'm only at the beginning of my course and haven't gotten to the part where they explain this concept (if at all available in the course).

Thank you!