Complex Sentences
By Susan Mandel Glazer

We don't often talk about the difficulty of sentences that kids are expected to read and write. I wonder, which of you have thought about whether certain types of sentences are more difficult to process than others? In order to find this out, I've prepared a mini-test so you may discover what you know about sentence complexity. There are five sentences below and brackets next to each. Review the sentences and label the easiest by numbering from one to five in order of difficulty.

1. The big, tall, very important red monster scared all of the children on Halloween. [ ]
2. John, disturbingly, left the meeting. [ ]
3. When he was young, he was a football player. [ ]
4. He was a football player when he was young . [ ]
5. To be or not to be, that is the question. [ ]

All about syntax
The complexity of sentences or syntax (sentence constructions are referred to as syntactic structures) is based on several factors. First, sentence patterns most frequently used by human beings are easiest to process. The easy sentences comprise 80 percent of oral language for people of all ages. And interestingly enough, 80 percent of the sentence structures that are most often used when we speak consist of only two of 12 different sentence patterns existing in the English language. These are the subject, verb, object pattern (I have a dog) and subject, verb, adverbial pattern (Jim wants to play).

Now, some of you may be saying to yourself, "I don't see these sentence types in the five sentences listed here!" But they're there. The first sentence has a subject, verb, object pattern. The subject is 'the monster,' the verb is 'scared' and the object is 'the children.' So, the basic sentence is, "The monster scared the children." The rest are additions to the basic sentence pattern. It's the additions that make some sentences difficult for some kids to remember. Each piece of information requires the reader to remember more. Additions result by putting parts of lots of sentences into one.

What's the combination?
Research has indicated that the human mind goes through many operations, automatically and unconsciously, in order to carry out sentence-combining activities. And although the first sentence required several combinations, it is not complex. Very young children and adults alike have a natural propensity to delete and then combine repeated words when speaking.

The second sentence, "John, disturbingly, left the meeting," is difficult. The sentence construction is rarely used even by adults; therefore, it's unfamiliar to most. An adverbial is used in the middle of a sentence, which is not the way most of us use this element of language. It's more common to say, "John left the meeting, disturbingly." Even this is difficult to process because it's an adverbial and in an unusual position in the sentence. So although it has only five words compared to 14 in the first, it's far more complex and therefore, more difficult to understand.

The third and fourth sentences are fascinating to consider. The researchers who studied language acquisition in the 1960s and 1970s discovered that it was more difficult for the young mind to understand sentences when dependent clauses appeared at the beginning rather than at the end of sentences. Why this is such a mystery we don't know, but the mind works in magical ways and the data collected over many years consistently demonstrates which sentence structures make language easy or difficult to process.

"To be or not to be, that is the question," although short in length, is the most difficult of these sentence structures to process. What, for example, does "to be" mean? Or what does "not to be" mean? Even more perplexing is that fact that it's difficult to decide whether this sentence is a question or not.

Understanding sentences
Most of us are concerned with our students' abilities to recognize and understand words. We are concerned, too, that they're able to compose text in well-written formats. But few of us ever consider the difficulties sentences cause when it comes to understanding what we read and organizing words into sentences when we write. Successful reading and writing is dependent upon many factors. The complexity of sentences children are expected to read and the diversity of sentence patterns they're expected to use in their writing ought to depend upon both their age and experience. Understanding sentences is developmental, because the more we speak and the older we get, the more sentence structures we are able to use.

And now, the answers – the complexities of the five sentences on the previous page are: 1.= easiest, 2.= fourth easiest, 3.= third easiest, 4.= second easiest, 5.= fifth easiest.

Susan Mandel Glazer is the Director of the Center for Reading and Writing at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ.