Understanding Hard Sentences

First, do you understand simple sentences? 

I:             Jack climbs up the hill. 

II:             Jack has a pail. 

III:             Jack gets his Mom a pail of water.

IV:             Jack is a good boy.

V:             Jack is hurt.

VI:             Jack’s Mom called the top of his head his crown.

VII:             Jack’s Mom declared his crown broken.

Here’s another simple sentence: Jack said, “Ow!”  It is simple because the spoken part is not a clause (not a sentence pattern).  Which pattern is it?

Here’s a compound sentence: Jack fell down, and Jill came tumbling after him.

This is a complex sentence: Mom said, “Now, hold still while I bandage that cut!”  It is complex because the spoken part is a clause (like a sentence).  But the pattern of the whole sentence follows Simple Sentence Pattern II, a simple three-part design of N-V-N or Subject-Action Verb-Object.  

And this is a complex sentence: Mom said that vinegar and paper would work.

It is because there are so many “Simple” sentences of this pattern in the dialogue of fiction and because there are so many narrative (action) sentences in fiction that most fiction has a reading level of about Grade 5.  Plays are also at a lower reading level than expositions because the explanations must be given in ordinary conversational style; the writer is forced to break up the long bits into question and answer patterns.

Now, let’s look at something harder.  I have selected some sentences from Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.  This is the most-quoted book on economics even though it was published in 1776.  You may think you can’t understand economics, but Smith makes it fairly straight-forward.  You need to know that he uses the word ‘master’ where we would use ‘employer’ or ‘business-owner’, the word ‘combine’ where we might use the word ‘conspire’, and ‘equals’ where we would use ‘members of his own class’ or ‘peers’. 

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals.

That was at a reading level of 11.5.  Did your eyes glaze over as you read it?  One way to read this sort of non-fiction if you need to understand it, is to break it up into a table of lists of Events or Facts and of Conditions this way:

Now, try this table method with more of Smith’s paragraph:

We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of. Masters too sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

Did your table look like this?

Here's another way of looking at that set of sentences: