Sentence Structure: The Basics of Word Order

A grammatical sentence is more than just the sum of its parts: as well as the particular words you use, you have to order them correctly. If you do this, you can be confident your written work will be clear and easy to read.

Failure to get your words order in order, on the other hand, may detract from the flow of your writing and lose you valuable marks. Thankfully, the basics of word order are pretty easy to remember with the term ‘SVO’.

Subject, Verb and Object (SVO)

The minimum required for a grammatical sentence is a subject (i.e. the active person or thing in the sentence) followed by a verb (i.e. the thing being done):

In the above, the subject is ‘Steve’ and the verb is ‘dances’. Reversing the word order here (‘Dances Steve’) wouldn’t make sense.

Most sentences, including any sentence with a transitive verb, also require an object. This is the thing being acted upon and should come after the verb:

Here, the subject (‘Sally’) acts upon (‘kicks’) the object (‘the ball’). Any order other than subject + verb + object would be ungrammatical without adding extra words.

Indirect Objects

If you’re now feeling braver about word order, you might be ready to tackle indirect objects too. An indirect object is the thing that receives the direct object in a sentence, such as:

In this case, ‘Jimmy’ is the subject, ‘gave’ is the verb, ‘the present’ is the object, and ‘his grandad’ is the indirect object. As you can see, when following a preposition like ‘to’, the indirect object comes after the object.

However, if the preposition is omitted from the sentence, the indirect object should come before the object (i.e. subject + verb + indirect object + object):

This distinction is important, so it’s always worth checking whether your sentence contains a preposition if you’re unsure about word order.

Summary of Sentence Structure

As mentioned, the basic word order for a grammatical sentence is captured in the initialism SVO:

Subject + Verb + Object

This is complicated slightly if the sentence includes an indirect object, as the correct word order depends upon whether or not you’re using a preposition. If you are using a preposition, the correct order is:

Subject + Verb + Object + Indirect Object

If the preposition is omitted, the sentence should be ordered:

Subject + Verb + Indirect Object + Object