Sentences

Abstract

Sentences constitute a crucial grammatical level in written texts and this is particularly true for science examinations. Within almost any sentence, information is organised in different ways and different forms of organisation serve different purposes. Sentences incorporate things, people and events and they must be organised in such a way as to express the relationships between these constituents. Sentences must also be structured to show their relationship, and that of their constituent elements, to other parts of the encompassing text. A systemic functional analysis of the sentences of an examination question can illuminate problematical structures and, very often, can indicate alternative forms.