Two Parts

The concept of pairs is prevalent in our society: two pairs of shoes, two slices of bread for a sandwich, and two flights for a round trip. These examples, however, are two identical pieces that form a cohesive whole. There are many other cases where two dissimilar pieces create one new entity: a ball and a hoop make basketball, hydrogen and oxygen become water, and a man and a woman create a marriage.

In the same way, a sentence needs two main parts to be a complete sentence. The first part, being the subect, even being long . . . >-----------< . . . needs to be finished by a verb of some sort. Therefore, a subject and a verb come together to form a complete sentence. Jesus wept. "Jesus" answers the question of who, and "wept" fulfills the action. If either part is missing, the sentence is not complete. It would be like a man going to his wedding and marrying . . . himself! It just would not work; he needs a wife.

Identifying the subject and verb of a sentence is the first part towards becoming a confident writer. Even if the sentence is long and contains a great deal of introductory information, the confident writer who knows how to identify subjects and verbs will punctuate the sentence correctly no matter how many additional phrases are present in the sentence.