The thinking seemed to be that the more fancy words and complex sentence structures they could shoehorn into an essay, the greater their likelihood of getting an A. Much of my job consisted of ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

A dependent clause cannot stand alone, though they often contain both a subject and a verb. Where independent clauses express complete thoughts, dependent clauses do not, and left on their own, ...