The structure of a basic active voice sentence is an easy but important concept. Such sentences inform about someone (subject) doing (verb) something (object), leaving no questions unanswered to readers or listeners. Examples of such sentences are, "John eats a hamburger," "Mum cooked a meal," "Ethan adopted a dog" and "Martha is watching TV." Readers know who acts, what is the action and towards what.
Passive voice reverses the subject-verb-object structure, turning the former object to a subject, while making the former subject a non-vital part of the sentence (passive object). The active voice's verb becomes an auxiliary verb (be) plus the main verb in past participle. Passive voice sentence structure is useful when you don't know who did the action, as in "John was robbed yesterday," when you want to focus on who was affected by an action, as in "Fields were destroyed by heavy rain," or when it is obvious who did the action: "Kelly was arrested."
A predicative is a noun, adjective or adverb, supplementing the subject or object of the sentence. They are used to reveal more information on a specific issue, while they can also substitute the object altogether when the sentence describes an attribute of the subject. For example, in "Tasha painted the jar blue," the word "blue" is the predicative supplementing the object jar. However, in "Jack seems nice," "nice" refers to an attribute of the subject Jack.
Compound sentences are those containing two or more independent clauses, or simple, meaningful sentences. Introduce a step-by-step process of constructing a compound sentence, writing two short sentences on the board: "John wants a car." "John cannot afford it." Explain the contrast between the two sentences and reveal the appropriate conjunction, such as but. Merge the two sentences, avoiding repetition by replacing the second "Jack" with "he": "John wants a car, but he cannot afford it." Don't forget to give examples of forming compound sentences with other conjunctions such as "and," "so," "for," "yet," and "or".