"The genius of Oliver Wendell Holmes lay in his ability to convey meaning succinctly."

—Justice Stephen Breyer, quoted by Ben Yagoda in The Sound on the Page (2005)

The next quiz uses one of the most celebrated writers ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , to introduce four types of sentence structures: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex.

We have encountered Holmes before, back in Course 1 when learning about the Rule of Three. We'll also come across him later in this course when learning about parallel structure and how to put "corresponding ideas in corresponding forms."

If you can spot the different sentence types in his writing, you’ll have a good base for when we eventually tackle everything from rhetorical repetition to stylishly crafted paragraphs.

And don’t worry if the labels “simple,” “compound,” “complex,” and "compound-complex" are new to you. Before you take the quiz, you can check out this helpful guide created by Curtis Newbold , who teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

For more on Justice Holmes:

Read

Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky (2019)

Watch

Oliver Wendell Holmes: Civil War Soldier by Andrew Porwancher (2016)

Visit

The Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Digital Suite (Harvard Law School, 2020)