English IV S o D 6

Now that you've completed Sentence Basics Lessons 1 to 5, let's put your skills to work on a sentence from our reading. Today's sentence comes from Barbara Lazear Ascher's "The Boxman."

Standing unselfconsciously
in the white glare of an overhead
light, he began to sort
through the boxes, picking them up,
one by one, inspecting tops,
insides, flaps.

Pick out main parts!

Bracket off prep phrases:

Standing unselfconsciously [in the white glare] [of an overhead light,] he began to sort [through the boxes], picking them up, one [by one], inspecting tops, insides, flaps.

• "to sort" is not a prep phrase because "sort" is a verb.

Find verbs:

Standing unselfconsciously [in the white glare] [of an overhead light,] he began to sort [through the boxes], picking them up, one [by one], inspecting tops, insides, flaps.

• You may have been tempted to select "standing," "picking", and "inspecting" as verbs. You aren't wrong. They are verb forms. We can save ourselves a step here, though, by knowing that -ing verbs always have helping verbs if they take a subject. If you have an -ing verb without a helping verb, there's no need to go hunting for a subject. There won't be one. The -ing verbs in this sentence are participles and are acting as modifiers. Sometimes -ing verbs act as nouns.
• I identify "began to sort" as one verb because those three words are expressing one action.

Who or what began to sort? He

• He is the subject.

He began to sort who or what? There is no answer, so there's no direct object

• You may have been tempted to choose "boxes" as the DO, but it can't be because it is the object of a preposition. Remember, any one word can do only one job.

Despite its length, this sentence has only one clause. Therefore it is a simple sentence.