In my last post, I held a sentence-building competition for my students. Sadly, only one participated and she was arguably among the best in 4A class. Nevertheless, I thank Aniha binti Rahim for her effort and congratulations to her, she is the winner!
Although there are a lot to be said about her sentence, make no mistake, she already tried her best.
This is her sentence:
The labourer,who is Nazmizan works at the construction of the new hospital diligently after he tried a lot of vacancies because his low academic achievement is not comparable with other jobs since he get low grades in academic as he need to work to feed his poor family and himself. (50 words)
Now, let us check her sentence whether it is written according to the rules. Rule number one : The participant must use the given subject and finite verb above as the main subject and verb. In her sentence, she used 'The labourer' as her subject and 'works' as her main verb. PASSED.
Rule number four : The finite verb must be used in the suitable tenses. She wrote 'works' in Simple Present Tense because her sentence is a statement or fact. However, the tenses for other verbs are incorrectly used. The verb 'tried' is not suitable and it should be substituted with 'had tried'. The verbs 'get' and 'need' is simply grammatical wrong in terms of Subject-Verb Agreement. She should have used 'gets' and 'needs'. PARTLY PASSED.
Rule number two : The participant must use Complex Sentence. Compound Sentence will not be accepted. In the sentence we can see that there are at least 4 sentences combined with the conjunctions 'after', 'because' and 'as'. The labourer,who is Nazmizan works at the construction of the new
hospital diligently after he tried a lot of vacancies because his low
academic achievement is not comparable with other jobs since he get low
grades in academic as he need to work to feed his poor family and
himself. FAILED.
CORRECTION
The same sentence can be written as below:
Nazmizan, a hardworking labourer who had tried a lot of vacancies because his low academic achievement is not comparable with other
jobs since he gets low grades in academic as he needs to work to feed his
poor family and himself, works at the construction of the new hospital diligently. (50 words)
This sentence still comply to rule number three : Using the word 'The labourer' is optional. Any other words with the same meaning is acceptable. In my correction, I use 'Nazmizan' as my subject, and I really mean him to be the labourer in the sentence.
You also have to use punctuation clearly; in this case, a comma, to separate the sentences which are joined by the conjunctions. These two commas differentiate between the main sentence, 'Nazmizan works at the construction of the new hospital diligently' from the supporting sentence; the adjective clause.
