Well, these little munchkins are the final hoorah for sentence structures. Something of a curtain call: everything comes out to raucous applause.

A compound-complex sentence has at least two independent clauses and any number of dependent clauses all pushing and shoving for attention.

A well-crafted compound-complex sentence is a thing to behold with modifiers found in dependent clauses that help the independent clauses fly.

Let’s look at a pretty basic example (inspired by the kids in the garden!).

The little girl screamed when her big brother took the ribbon, which had been lying on the ground, and he ran around the garden with it fluttering in the breeze behind him.

Not a glorious piece of writing, granted, but here you can see where the parts of the sentence are.

One more blog coming up — a little trick to spot the clause types and work out whether it’s an independent or dependent clause.