Sentence Builder Tool

This tool is a hands-on way to explore how English sentences are put together, so you can understand (or teach) sentence structure with confidence.

You’ll start with the most important rule in English grammar:

A complete sentence needs a subject + a verb.

From there, you can add additional parts (like objects, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, and clauses) to make the sentence richer, more precise, and more interesting—just like real English. And you can add this parts in any order to easily explore the incredible variety of sentences that are possible in the English language.

1. Start simple: you’ll see a basic sentence in the box (subject + verb).
2. Click any button to add something new to the sentence.
3. Click the same button again to cycle through more examples of that same part (more subjects, more objects, more adjectives, etc.).
4. Click buttons in any order—and the tool will keep the sentence grammatical.

You’ll notice that each part of the sentence appears in a colored “token”. Those colors match the button categories, so you can instantly see what each word or chunk of words is doing in the sentence.

Why This Tool Can Always Stay Correct
(Even When You Click Randomly)

A big challenge in grammar tools is this: if users click things in a random order, the sentence often becomes ungrammatical.

This tool avoids that problem with a few smart rules:

• If you click Determiner, the tool automatically makes sure there’s an Object to attach it to.
• If a Noun Clause is showing (like what he wanted to eat), clicking Object switches back to a normal object phrase.
• If you click Adjective:
  • it modifies the object if an object exists
  • otherwise it modifies the subject
  • and if a noun clause is showing, it switches back to a normal noun phrase so the adjective has a real noun to describe

So the sentence stays teachable and clean—no dead ends, no broken grammar.

An Important Note:
Why “Ate” and “Tried” Are Perfect for This Tool

This tool uses the verbs ate and tried for a very specific reason: they make it easy to demonstrate how sentences can be complete and expandable.

1) They can stand alone as complete sentences

• Rick ate.
• Rick tried.

In classroom terms, these examples are treated as complete because the verb doesn’t require the object to be stated for the sentence to be grammatical in many real contexts (even if it feels incomplete in meaning). That’s perfect for a tool that needs a strong “starter sentence.”

2) They can also take objects naturally

• Rick ate pizza.
• Rick tried the cake.
• Rick tried a salad.

So learners can see the difference between:

• Subject + Verb (minimum sentence)
• Subject + Verb + Object (expanded meaning)

Important classroom point

Teachers may want to explicitly mention: not all verbs behave like this.
Some verbs strongly require an object in normal usage (e.g., Rick bought… sounds unfinished without an object). Others cannot take objects at all (e.g., arrive, sleep). This tool uses “friendly” verbs so learners can focus on structure without constantly hitting exceptions.

Another Important Note:
Why the “Object” Nouns Are Special
(Pizza, Salad, Fish, Lunch, etc.)

The object words in this tool are also carefully chosen. Nouns like pizza, salad, fish, lunch, dinner are unusually flexible because many of them can work as countable or mass nouns depending on meaning and context.

That’s why you can naturally see combinations like:

• a pizza / some pizza
• a salad / some salad
• a fish (one whole fish) / some fish (fish as food)
• a lunch (one meal) / some lunch (less common, but possible in certain contexts)

This flexibility makes it easier for the tool to cycle determiners like a / the / this / that / some / one without producing awkward examples every time.

When ESL instructors are using this tool to show their students the variety of possibilities in how English sentences can be built in so many different ways, they can also demonstrate separately how most nouns are either mass nouns or countable nouns, and they can provide some useful examples, explaining that all singular countable nouns require a determiner, etc.

Important classroom point

Teachers should highlight that many nouns do NOT work this way.
For example, you normally can’t say a rice (without changing the meaning), and some chair is unusual unless it means “some kind of chair.” So students should learn the bigger rule:

Determiners depend on the type of noun (countable vs. uncountable) and on meaning.

This tool gives “training-wheel nouns” so the grammar patterns are easy to notice.

Using This Tool with Our Other Sentence Tools

This Sentence Builder is designed to work together with our full set of English sentence tools. Each tool focuses on a different aspect of structure, meaning, and fluency, and when used together they provide a clear, progressive way to understand how English really works—both for learners and for teachers in the classroom.

A Note on Names and Pronouns

You may notice that the current examples use only male names and male pronouns. We sincerely apologize for this limitation.

Creating a system that includes a balanced mix of female and male names and pronouns while still guaranteeing that every automatically generated sentence remains grammatically correct turned out to be more complex than the coding capabilities of our tech team and its AI tutors.

That said, this is an area we care deeply about—and we are actively working on improving it.

Our goal is to make this tool not only linguistically accurate, but also inclusive, natural, and representative of real-world language use. Thank you for your understanding as we continue to refine and expand the system.