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How To Write Good Sentences

On Tatoeba, unlike in a dictionary, people write sentences, not individual words. However, many contributions are not sentences in the traditional meaning of the word. Some are series of two or more consecutive sentences, while others are sentence fragments. This page is meant to define what constitutes a good sentence in the Tatoeba sense. For clarity, the term "contribution" will be used to stand for "Tatoeba sentence" (that is, an item that has its own number), while "sentence" will be used in its traditional sense.

The questions that a contributor should ask him or herself before adding a contribution are "Will this contribution help non-native speakers? If it might confuse them, can I reduce the chance of confusion? If it might offend people, can I reword it or give people a way to filter it out?"

In addition to this page, be sure to read the following:

Those links can also be found under "For New Contributors" on the home wiki page.

Criteria

Contributions that meet the following criteria are generally helpful and do not require tags:

clear
self-contained, or referring to a context that can be easily imagined
likely
written in a current, standard dialect of the language
natural
unlikely to offend

Contributions that do not meet all of those criteria may or may not be helpful. They can be made more helpful by:

adding context to the contribution itself (for instance, by adding words, or turning it into a dialogue)
adding tags (for example, "archaic", "controversial", "poetic", "vulgar")

Furthermore, contributions should not use the following:

special symbols such as emoji ("That makes me sad. :-(")
parenthetical annotations ("Come up and see me sometime. (Mae West)")
slashes or parentheses used to provide multiple readings ("Each child should pick up his/her belongings.")

Self-Contained

The following types of contributions are self-contained or refer to a context that can be easily imagined:

a well-formed sentence ("Run!"; "I see."; "I touched the ball first.")
a sentence fragment that is a likely utterance ("Wrong again!"; "No, the red one, not the blue one.")
a coherent dialogue consisting of a sequence of well-formed sentences and/or likely sentence fragments whose meaning is clear ("You tricked me." "Only because you tricked me first.")

The following generally will not:

an unlikely fragment in isolation ("Red elephants and blue zebras.")
a fragment that contains too few or too many words to serve as a self-contained unit ("Better than." "The bottom of the one that.")

Natural

Natural contributions use syntax, structure, and word choice typical of native speakers using a standard dialect. The following contributions would violate one part or another of that criterion:

repetitive where a native speaker would avoid repetition ("We have a cat. We are fond of the cat.")
setting up a structure that is mostly but not fully parallel ("I like reading, watching movies, and to listen to music." instead of "I like reading, watching movies, and listening to music." or "I like to read, watch movies, and listen to music.")
including a word that would generally be omitted by a native speaker (as in "grape" in "We drank grape wine all day.")
including comma splices in languages (like English) that discourage them ("I ran around all day in the heat, it wasn't much fun.")

Unlikely to Offend

Contributions that are unlikely to offend are those that do not:

violate the Rules and Guidelines
use language that would be considered vulgar or sexual