Notes 1. There is an "and" missing between the two clauses: "[If you go in the front door] *and [if* you go down the hall and turn left] you come to my brothers room." The error, if we want to call it one, probably results from the fact that the first "if" clause is also a conditional for the second -- "If you go in the front door, you go down the hall and turn left *to get to my brother's room*." 2. The problem here is probably a further indication of fourth grader's problems with conditional "if" clauses. Linguists who note that almost all grammatical constructions appear in the language of pre-schoolers are right, but they do not address the question, at least not in much detail that can be studied by other researchers, of how well young students use them. 3. I have left comma-splices, etc., as I found them and do not intend to comment on each one in these pages, but students working at KISS Level Three should be taught how to fix them. 4. I'm taking "It's" to mean "The reason is," and thus the "because" clause equals the reason for feeling great. I wouldn't object if a student wanted to consider the "because" clause as adverbial to "is." The "it" would then refer to the entire preceding sentence. [I have never seen a grammar book deal with this type of construction.] 5. This is, of course, a subordinate clause
fragment which could be "fixed" by connecting it to the preceding sentence.
Doing so, however, would create a 30-word main clause, almost four times
the
8.6 word average of this writer, and more than four times the 7.7 word
average of all four writers. This option would also make the following
"because" clause a third level embedding (a subordinate clause within a
subordinate clause within a subordinate clause). Except
for this fragment, none of these fourth grade writers used a third level
embedded subordinate clause.
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