The word “should” is a modal verb used to indicate obligation, advice, expectation, or hypothetical situations. Writers use it to express duty, recommendation, or imagined outcomes. The examples below are drawn from authentic works to show how “should” appears in real writing.
Real Sentences for Should
This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait.
Source: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
21 words, 101 characters
To this, perceiving no objection, I consented, stipulating only that my real name should be retained.
Source: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
16 words, 101 characters
My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 words, 142 characters
It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
25 words, 145 characters
Possibly I had conjured up impossible dangers, like some nervous old housewife, and when I should catch up with Powell would get a good laugh for my pains.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
28 words, 155 characters
The Publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting Frankenstein for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
31 words, 179 characters
At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce anything worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter.
Source: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
39 words, 210 characters
I knew that I was a good officer and sailor, and I didn’t propose submitting to degradation and discharge because a lot of old, preglacial fossils had declared over two hundred years before that no man should cross thirty.
Source: Beyond Thirty by Edgar Rice Burroughs
39 words, 222 characters
I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
52 words, 239 characters
He afterward proposed (finding that I would not stir in the matter) that I should allow him to draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it in the Southern Messenger under the garb of fiction.
Source: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
49 words, 272 characters
He told me at this time that if anything should happen to him he wished me to take charge of his estate, and he gave me a key to a compartment in the safe which stood in his study, telling me I would find his will there and some personal instructions which he had me pledge myself to carry out with absolute fidelity.
Source: A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
63 words, 317 characters
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child.
Source: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
62 words, 338 characters
More examples coming soon.
