Use of Complex Sentences in IELTS Writing

Students who are preparing for the IELTS exam should know the usage of complex sentences in the exam. Many of them fall into false information about the tactics and techniques to be used in the IELTS exam, which will result in the loss of marks. Usually, the IELTS aspirants use long and exhausting tough sentences and it will lead to making errors in meaning, IELTS grammar and many sentences will not be comprehensible to the examiner. In this article, we will be concerning the usage of complex sentences in more detail.

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This article provides an idea about the usage and making of complex sentences also, how many complex sentences can be used in a paragraph. To get a good IELTS score, candidates should employ a mix of complex and simple sentences in their responses. The examiners are mostly concerned with this. So, in your finest answers, remember to include both simple and complex sentences.

What is a Complex Sentence?

Usually, we mean by complex sentence to use more complicated words that are difficult to understand, but in the IELTS exam, the complex sentence means to combine two or more ideas and concepts to make the passage more efficient and concise.

Example - ‘Industrialization is both a blessing and a curse for us. Factory pollution causes a large deal of environmental degradation and has a negative impact on aquatic life.’

The sentence is not complex here; rather, it is incoherent, and the reader will be unable to get the writer's intended meaning. This resulted in miscommunication. When we make it simple, the above sentence will become,

‘Development is both good and bad for us. Factory causes pollution and it leads to the death of aquatic animals.’

This sentence has the same meaning as seen in the last one, but it is articulated in a more forthright manner. This will also guide you to losing marks on the IELTS exam.

When we make it into complex, it will go like

Example - ‘Development is both a blessing and a curse. The factory is the prior head of pollution in the industrial world. Pollution caused the deaths of many aquatic species.’

This sentence now makes sense; it is grammatically right and simple to understand. We combine simple ideas to create them more complex. This is what the examiners of the IELTS exam are looking for.

The Usage of Complex Sentences

Complex sentences are commonly used when you need to expand on the significant point or provide supporting examples. The simple sentence is used to represent the essential facts of the passage. This approach is comprehensible. The reader will get the proper notion of meaning about what the writer means by a particular sentence. This is recommended in the IELTS exam.

Creation of Complex Sentence

If you want to create a complex sentence, first of all, you need to be thorough with the grammatical formats. Combining simple ideas by using the proper grammatical forms in the formation sentence will undoubtedly help you to gain a good score in the IELTS exam. Usually, a complex sentence has a dependent clause and an independent clause. Let us look deeply into it in the following passage. The usage of the dependent clause and the independent clause in a sentence

Example - ‘because the sky is clouded, as we can see this independent clause includes both subject and modal verbs in IELTS grammar but it does not make the complete meaning. It only acquires complete meaning when it is combined with the independent clause

Let us use the independent clause ‘I took an umbrella’, now let us combine both the independent clause and dependent clause

Now the result turns out “ I took an umbrella because the sky is cloudy”. This is the perfect example of a complex sentence.

Relative Clauses 

Relative clauses are used to supply extra information about a location, person, or thing. We will use relative pronouns in IELTS like who, which, and that.

Example - Water pollution which is majorly caused by factories can cause the death of aquatic animals.

Subordinate Clauses

A subordinate clause can define nouns and pronouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives in IELTS grammar. It can also perform as the subject or object of another clause. We will use the words like even, until, because, while, even, although, if and when,

Conditional Clauses

Conditional clauses are used to show that the action in the main clause is only possible if an actual condition is met.

Example - If I had a manager post in the LMS company, I would resign from my recent job

Compound Sentences

Compound sentences are made up of two independent clauses joined by a conjunction such as ‘for’, ‘and’ or ‘but’.

Example - I would like to ride a motorcycle, but I'm afraid.

If you can study these grammatical forms, You can add many complex sentences to your exam and achieve well on the IELTS exam.