This post contains fifteen exercises on sentence structure, asking you to identify simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences.

A compound-complex sentence is a sentence that contains at least two independent clauses and at least one dependent clause. Of the four types of sentences, it has the maximum number of minimum-required clauses, three.

A complex sentence is a sentence that contains one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. So, a complex sentence can have two dependent clauses but not two independent clauses.

A compound sentence, also called coordinate sentence, is a sentence that contains at least two independent clauses and no dependent clause. The fundamental of forming a compound sentence is to join independent clauses. If you noticed, we joined them in the above sentences through a coordinating conjunction ('but', 'so', etc., also known by the acronym FANBOYS) But that’s not the only way.

This post contains several examples of compound sentences. But for a separate sub-category of three independent clauses, all compound sentences contain exactly two independent clauses. And you’ll notice in few examples that the independent clauses in a compound sentence may be of different type: declarative and interrogative, exclamatory and declarative, and so on.

A simple sentence is a sentence that contains one independent clause. That’s it. Remember, an independent clause represents a complete idea, and hence it can stand as a sentence. A dependent clause, on the other hand, represents an incomplete idea, and hence it can’t stand as a sentence; it can exist only with the support of an independent clause.