Question

The English novelist Virginia Woolf, who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness in fiction, was a prolific writer, and the influence of her fiction and nonfiction on her contemporaries was both powerful and pervasive. Which statements best describe this sentence? Select three options. It is a complex sentence. It contains a restrictive clause. It is a compound-complex sentence. It contains a nonrestrictive clause. It links three clauses to add variety to a text.

Answer 1

Answer: The statements that best describe this sentence are "It is a compound-complex sentence", "It contains a nonrestrictive clause" and "It links three clauses to add variety to a text".

Explanation: The sentence provided is a compound-complex sentence because it is made up of two independent clauses and a dependent clause. The two independent clauses are "The English novelist Virginia Woolf was a prolific writer" and "the influence of her fiction and nonfiction on her contemporaries was both powerful and pervasive" and the dependent clause is "who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness in fiction", which is also a nonrestrictive clause because it offers nonessential information and it is found between commas. In that way, this sentence connects three clauses and presents two different types of sentences, which can more variety to a passage.  

Answer 2

• It is a complex sentence

A complex sentence is formed by a simple sentence and a dependent, or subordinate clause ( it has a subject and a verb but does not express a complete thought).

• It contains a restrictive clause.

A restrictive clause modifies the noun that precedes it in an important way. Restrictive clauses limit  such nouns and cannot be removed from a sentence without changing the sentence’s meaning. The restrictive clause is "who pioneered the use of stream of consciousness in fiction". There is nothing gramatically wrong if we take it and just leave "The English novelist Virginia Woolf, was a prolific writer, and the influence of her fiction and non- fiction on her contemporaries was both powerful and pervasive". However,  it does not have the same objective as the former example, which was to identify Virginia Woolf as a writer who used the technique stream of consciousness.

• It links three clauses to add variety to a text.