Practice in Identifying Sentences by Function
In terms of their function, sentences can be classified in four ways:
Note that the sentences in this exercise have been taken from passages in our Scrapbook of Styles. To view the sentences in context, click on the highlighted titles.
Instructions:
Identify each of the following sentences as declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamatory. When you're done, compare your answers with those on page two.
NOTE: To view this exercise without ads, click on the printer icon near the top of the page.
Also see:
Exercise in Identifying Sentences by Function
- declarative (making a statement)
- interrogative (asking a question)
- imperative (expressing a request or command)
- exclamatory (expressing strong feelings)
Note that the sentences in this exercise have been taken from passages in our Scrapbook of Styles. To view the sentences in context, click on the highlighted titles.
Instructions:
Identify each of the following sentences as declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamatory. When you're done, compare your answers with those on page two.
NOTE: To view this exercise without ads, click on the printer icon near the top of the page.
- "She carried her spectacles on a gold chain hung around her neck."
(Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings, 1984) - "What was the connection between reading and learning?"
(Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory, 1982) - "Is that all you want?"
(William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways, 1982) - "Don’t walk."
(Martin Amis, Money, 1984) - "Summer people move into the houses that had stood empty, unseen, and unnoticed all winter."
(Annie Dillard, "Mirages," 1982) - "Have you ever considered leaving New York?"
(Constance Taber Colby, The View from Morningside, 1978) - "There she goes! The woman with the puffy ankles!"
(Dave Barry, "Revenge of the Pork Person," 1988) - "The shacks were built of one thickness of pine planking covered with tarpaper."
(Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 1973)
- "She had backed just halfway out of the garage when the engine died."
(Evan S. Connell, Mrs. Bridge, 1959) - "Don't ask him the time."
(William H. Gass, The Tunnel, 1995) - "The old lady had already risen and placed a saucepan on the fire to prepare the morning milk."
(Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 1965) - "I stopped on a rise and looked back at the valley, which was vanishing in purple haze."
(Bill Barich, "Steelhead on the Russian," 1984) - "Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me?"
(Richard Wright, Black Boy, 1945) - "I visited the spring often in those first years, and had friends there--a frog, a woodcock, and an eel which had churned its way all the way up through the pasture creek to enjoy the luxury of pure water."
(E.B. White, "Progress and Change," 1939) - "If we object to corporal punishment, and I assume we do, on what grounds is this objection based?"
(Stephen Fry, Moab Is My Washpot, 1997) - "Cut out tissue as needed from inside the lips."
(Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death, 1963) - "Once when he was a boy, a man next door had gone crazy and had sat out in his back yard pitching gravel around and hollering out to his enemies in a loud angry voice."
(Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, 1966) - "Shout it out!"
(Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, 1988) - "The pass was high and wide and he jumped for it, feeling it slap flatly against his hands, as he shook his hips to throw off the halfback who was diving at him."
(Irwin Shaw, "The Eighty-Yard Run," 1955) - "We hunted old bottles in the dump, bottles caked with dirt and filth, half buried, full of cobwebs, and we washed them out at the horse trough by the elevator, putting in a handful of shot along with the water to knock the dirt loose; and when we had shaken them until our arms were tired, we hauled them off in somebody's coaster wagon and turned them in at Bill Anderson's pool hall, where the smell of lemon pop was so sweet on the dark pool-hall air that I am sometimes awakened by it in the night, even yet."
(Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, 1962)
Also see:
Exercise in Identifying Sentences by Function
Source...