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Types of sentences

Classifying sentences by purpose

Declarative sentences

Exclamatory sentences

Imperative sentences

Interrogative sentences

Interrogative sentences by tone

Interrogative sentences by changing word order

Classifying sentences by structure

Simple sentences

Compound sentences

Complex sentences

Compound-complex sentences

Exclamatory sentences

When a writer wants to make a strong exclamation, they can use an exclamatory sentence. All sentence types can be exclamatory ones if the situation is appropriate. For instance, say you just got home from your weekly tennis match with a friend, and someone asked you how you went. You might say something like:

I won.

Because it’s a weekly event, there’s nothing too special about it, so this sentence is just a declarative sentence. But in other circumstances, you may have just found out that the lotto ticket you bought was the winning one. As you burst in through the front door you might say something like:

I won!

This is an exclamatory sentence, because it’s getting across to the reader the strong emotions - excitement in this case - associated with the statement.

One type of exclamatory sentence, however, isn’t formed from one of the other sentence types. Say you’ve just heard about an old lady being robbed. You might exclaim something like:

How terrible!

Note that this is not a complete grammatical sentence. A grammatically more complete version of this would be:

How terrible it is that she was robbed!

You can form other grammatically incomplete sentences by starting with the words ‘what’ or ‘such’:

Click here to move on to the next topic: Imperative sentences