Understanding Mixed Sentence Structure
What if I told you that there's a type of sentence error that's exceedingly common, that's a major reason that teachers and professors deduct points from essays, and that is incredibly easy to spot and fix? So easy, in fact, that it doesn't require you to be able to define an independent clause, a coordinating conjunction, or a gerund? Sound too good to be true?
Just keep in mind: because you want your writing to be the best it can be, is why you should avoid mixed structure sentences.
Sounds a little funny, doesn't it? That's an example of a mixed structure sentence, which is a catch-all term for a sentence that starts off being structured one way but switches to a different structure halfway through. And like I said a moment ago, while this type of sentence error is fairly common, it's one of the very easiest sentence problems to identify and fix.
You may know from studying up on how to avoid run-on sentences, comma splices, and sentence fragments, for example, that it's important to understand and be able to identify various types of clauses and conjunctions to fix those errors. When it comes to mixed structure sentences, there's not an absolute rule that applies to fix each one.
Instead, mixed structure sentences can be quite varied, and the term applies to any sentence construction problem where the structure of the sentence changes halfway through. In this lesson, we'll review how good sentences can go off the rails and become mixed structure sentences as well as that aforementioned super easy, surefire way to catch and fix them.
How Mixed Sentence Structure Errors Occur
I get it. You don't have endless hours and hours to perfectly craft your writing assignments or a team of personal editors to comb through your papers before you turn them in. And, of course, standardized tests require that you write essay question responses quickly, which can leave the door wide open to grammatical mistakes.
Sometimes when you're writing, your mind might race as you try to get your sentences out, and the result is a jumble of words. Or, just the opposite, you might have a case of writer's block so terrible that you type out one. . . painful. . . word. . . at a time, and by the time you get to the period at the end of a sentence, you've long forgotten how that sentence started.
So, you might end up writing in a timed essay exam:
Although I'm a busy person, but I love to take time to study.
If you pay attention, you can see where the structure of this sentence implodes. The first half of the sentence is okay, and the structure makes sense up to a point: Although I'm a busy person,
And the second half, taken by itself, is okay, too: but I love to take time to study. But when we put them both together, it's not pretty.
Usually, fixing a mixed structure sentence takes just a bit of rearranging and double checking. We can solve this one by writing:
Although I'm a busy person, I love to take time to study.
Or you could write:
I'm a busy person, but I love to take time to study.
It's not exactly brain surgery, right? So, why do so many standardized exams feature questions requiring students to fix these types of errors? And how come so many English instructors spend sleepless nights grading stacks of papers with dozens of mixed structure sentence errors in them?