Writers use coordinating language when they want to show that ideas have equal weight. The following sentence from Stanley Milgram's "The Perils of Obedience" (The Anteater Reader, Spring 2001, p.113) combines two independent clauses with the coordinating conjunction and: "Some system of authority is a requirement of all communal living, and it is only the person dwelling in isolation who is not forced to respond . . . to the commands of others." The second clause elaborates on the first, but both clauses speak to the same idea. Neither is more important than the other.

Coordinating language can also show a contrast between two ideas of equal weight. Consider the following example from the same Milgram essay that employs the coordinating conjunction but to link independent clauses: "The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations." The two ideas in this sentence are different, but they have equal standing.

Sentences that link independent clauses are called compound sentences. Although this fact of grammar is pretty unexciting in itself, grammar choices, when wisely made, can have enormous impact. Ernest Hemingway is a writer who uses the apparently simple technique of compounding to telling effect in his story "Hills Like White Elephants." Deliberately refusing to subordinate in the grammar of his sentences, Hemingway creates a powerful, ironic tension between the trivial and the significant. This tension is at both the stylistic and thematic center of the story as the young couple in it hide their anger and fear in banal conversation.