Question

Locate a simple sentence in the passage below:

Emma Gonzales is a high school senior that addresses her concerns about gun control to government and gun advocates, after the incident involved a shooter that killed 17 people at her school. Kaitlin Bennett is a gun rights advocate, believes that any student should have the right to carry firearms, given the potential danger.

Ethos, logos, and pathos are the three main rhetorical appeals they both use to create compelling arguments to persuade their audience to side with them.

Emma Gonzales uses all three of these writer’s tactics in her speech on gun control to convince her audience to side with her position that gun laws should be changed.

• Explain why a simple sentence was most effective in this case, or explain why it might need to be changed to a different sentence type.
• Look at the sentences before and after. Are they both simple sentences as well? If so, does sentence variety need to be addressed here? Why or why not?

Answer 1

Solution

In the above mentioned paragraph all the sentences are complex sentences.

Look at the following sentences

“Emma Gonzales is a high school senior ................... involved a shooter that killed 17 people at her school”.

Here ‘that’ has been used to join two sentences and more than one verb has been used in this case. Hence this is not a simple sentence at all.

Same reason will be followed in the next sentence stating “Kaitlin Bennett is a gun rights............... given the potential danger”.

Further, in the following sentence “Ethos, logos, and pathos ................ to persuade their audience to side with them” more than one verb has been used and the sentence has one dependent clause and one independent clause as well.

In the next sentence ‘Emma Gonzales ............................. that gun laws should be changed’ more than one verb and one independent and one dependent clause have been used. Hence this is also a complex sentence.

Conclusion: Herein from my point of view, the last two sentences of the above mentioned paragraph including “Ethos, logos, and pathos are the three main rhetorical appeals .............their audience to side with them” and Emma Gonzales ................with her position that gun laws should be changed” should be changed to simple one by changing noun clause, adjective or adverb clause to a word or phrase as to improve the sentence formation. Hence, things should be taken into mind with respect to the number of clauses that have been incorporated to form a single sentence. More than two clauses makes a sentence very complex one to understand its inner meaning. Thus the above paragraph must be structured with the help of simple and complex sentences both to yield a meaningful paragraph with sentence variety as well.