If you learn that a sentence contains five things—and you learn to recognize these things easily, you will learn to evaluate whether every sentence you write is a “real” sentence or not more easily.
Remember, CAVES is the acronym we will use to examine a sentence.
C apital
A ll makes sense
V erb
E nd mark
S ubject
The last letter of CAVES—subject—is what we will examine today. Each “simple sentence”—that is, each “real” sentence must contain a subject. We will call this the sentence’s main subject—because a sentence may contain other subjects in other parts, but a sentence must only contain one subject (the main subject) to be a real sentence.
Tomorrow we will learn the details of a sentence’s main subject—the S of CAVES—subject–each sentence must have a subject.
