18 Compound Sentences

We need to review what a simple sentence is before we learn about more advanced aspects of sentence structure and grammar. Simply put, a simple sentence has one subject and one verb. Let’s look at some examples:

As you can see, there is only one subject and verb in each sentence above. This means that they are all simple sentences.

A compound sentence has two subjects and two verbs. Let’s look at some examples:

Do you see how there are two subjects and two verbs in each sentence? For example, in the first sentence, the two subjects are “the teachers” and “they,” and the two verbs are “taught” and “graded.”

Coordinating Conjunctions

You might have also noticed something else that the example sentences have in common: they all have a comma and a short word that connects the two parts. These words are called coordinating conjunctions. There are the most commonly used conjunctions:

1. and
2. but
3. so
4. or

Let’s look at the coordinating conjunctions in the example sentences that we saw before:

The table above highlights that a compound sentence is simply two sentence with a comma and coordinating conjunction in the middle.