Crossing the common
        in snow puddles
        at twilight
        under a clouded sky
        without . . . good fortune
I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.

Wrapped in his feather cape
        his winged boots
he sent his soul flying    to Zede
    while holding
            his body
            his thought
            his attentions on Carlotta, whom he did not cease to love.
 

Simple sentence:

Mary loves John.

Sample 1
    London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.  Henry James.

Imitation
    Our town was ugly, empty, cold, and above all forbidding.

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Sample 2
    He remembered much of his stay in the womb.  While there, he bgan to be aware of sounds and tastes . . . Yet he was not afraid.  The changes were right.  It was time for them.  His body was ready.  Octavia Butler Adulthood Rites

Imitation:
    She planned most of her day in the morning.  At home, she recognized familiar sounds and smells.  Yet she was not at home.  The feeling was ll wrong.  The time was not ripe.  She was not ready.

Your Try:
 

Analysis:
Butler composed a string of plain simple sentences to convey the impressions felt by a sensitive young child.  Strings of simple sentences can also convey other ethical effects, such as intense concentration.

Some Simple Sentences to Imitate:
A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.  Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly

The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.   Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera

Out of the back of the truck the city of San Francisco is bouncing down the hill, all those endless staggers of bay windows, slums with a view, bouncing and streaming down the hill.  Tom WOlfe, "Black Shiny FBI shoes."

Your Try:
 

Complex Sentence:
John loves Mary even though she reads Milton.

In a complex sentence, one or more dependent colons are attached to one or more independent colons.  A colon is dependent if it doesn't make sense by itself; it depends on another colon to make it complete.

Sample 1
Writing, reading, thinking, imagining, speculating.  These are luxury activities, so I am reminded, permitted to a privileged few, whose idle hours of the day can be viewed otherwise than as a bowl of rice or a loaf of bread less to share with the family.
    --Trinh T. Minh-ha, "Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box."

Imitation.
Aspen, sycamore, ponderosa, oak, laurel.  These are the hardy trees, so I understand, classed among the privileged few, whose growth patterns in every season cannot be viewed otherwise than as a mere creeping along, a finely tuned adjustment to their surroundings.

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Analysis
In this passage Minh-ha punctuated the first string of words as a sentence, even though a grammatical purist would deny them that status.  In the second sentence, she interrupted the independent colon with another, brief independent colon ("so I am reminded"), and attached a dependent colon at the end.

Sample 2
As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects  inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the junk food still in shopping bags--onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.  --Don DeLillo, White Noise

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Analysis.  This very long utterance is, nevertheless, a single complex sentence.  The main colon is "students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside."  The dependent colon begins the sentence, and the rest of the sentence is filled out with noun phrases.

A compound sentence has two or more colons that are independent of one another.  That is, each could stand alone as a simple sentence.  Usually, the colons in a compound sentence are linked together by "and," "but," or "or."  In order to produce a different effect, however, writers can omit the words that ordinarily connect colons in a compound sentence and substitute punctuation instead (thus producing the figure asyndeton).

Compound Sentences:

John loves Mary but Mary despises John.

Sample 1.  She was traveling alone and was too short to wield her roll easily.  She tried once, and she tried twice, and finally I got up and helped her.  The plane was packed: I'd never seen a plane quite so crowded before.  Audi Lord  "notes from a Trip to Russia."

Imitation:
Mary was working hard and was too tired to deal with John well.  She put it off, and put it off again, and finally she gave in and called him.  The conversation was trying: she'd never known how to do this sort of thing.

Your Try:
 
 

Analysis:
In the first sentence in this passage, Lord connected the two colons in the standard way, with "and."  IN the second, however, she used punctuation and a connecting word, thus creating the figure polysyndeton.  In the third sentence in the passage, she used a punctuation mark to connect the compound colons.  Compound sentences can be used to pile up images or assertions; this piling up yields a variety of effects.

Sample 2.
And I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which our reality is predicated on the premises with which we begin; or the extent to which measurement is in the eye of the beholder--or the ear of the listener.  Dale Spender, The Writing or the Sex?

Analysis
Here Spender ignored the traditional advice that sentences should never begin with "and."  Furthermore, she broke up her sentence at unusual and interesting points; another writer might not have employed dashes as an interuptio between references to "eye" and "ear," which are commonly paired.

A Compound Sentences to Imitate

We called the waiter, paid, and started to walk through town.  I started off walking with Brett, but Robert Cohn came up and joined her on the other side . . . . There were many people walking to go and see the bulls, and carriages drove down the hill and across the bridge, the drivers, the horses, and the whips rising above the walking people in the street.  Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

Your Try:
 
 

A Compound-complex sentence contains at least two independent colons and at least one dependent colon.

Compound-Complex Sentence

John loves Mary and remains faithful to her even though he reads Milton.

Sample 1
This work came together in a slow way.  Always something would get in the way--relationships ending, exile, loneliness, some recently discovered pain--and I had to hurt again, hurt myself all the way away from writing, re-writing, putting the book together.
bell hooks, Talking Back

Imitation

We traveled very slowly.  Always events would block our progress--equipment failing, travel, illness, some newly discovered glitch--and we had to think again, rethink our work all the way back to the beginning, tinkering, improvising, putting our plans aside.

Analysis
The first sentence in this passage is, of course, a simple sentence.  In the compound-complex sentence that follows, hooks inserts a comma between the two independent colons, punctuating it with dashes.  She then repeats the verb of the second independent colon ("hurt" ) to create a dependent colon that concludes with three participial phrases (writing, re-writing, putting), thus creating the small parallelism that brings the sentence to a close.
 

A sentence to imitate:
We all begin well, for in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.  Gertrude Stein  The Making of Americans.