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Love a solid coverage on an important piece of grammar. I personally don’t prefer periodic sentences in writing. I like shorter, more direct sentences with just the basic SOV agreement with some prepositional phrases thrown in for clarity. But overall, periodic sentences are great to be familiar with especially if you want to read older stuff. Thanks for the read, Tracy!

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Let me just say how much I love this.

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That was fun. Thanks!

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Aug 16·edited Aug 16Author

Here's a sentence diagram of the sentence from the Declaration. I'm not sure I completely agree with this formulation. But this is how to *visualize* a grammatical analysis.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2a/5d/ef/2a5def370ec4ca6e292e98b070f84a38.png

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Here's another great periodic sentence -- extolling, in effect, periodic sentences. :)

"The rhetorical inspiration communicated by the diligent study of BURKE, the unconscious quickening received from the dominant creative impulses of his era, the fastidious care bestowed upon the Addisonian age, together with the influence of that mode of classical training once prevalent in the Universities, in which scrupulous regard was had to the inculcation of literary form rather than to a technical and exacting philological study — these are the principal elements in the evolution of that prose diction which has constituted one of the literary phenomena of our century."

Source: jstor.org/stable/456026

“A Study of Lord Macaulay’s English” by Henry Shepherd (1887)

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