Varying Sentence Structures
When you first learned to write, you used very simple sentence structures. For instance, you may have written a paragraph that is very similar to the following:
Mrs. Mallard’s husband died in a train crash. Mrs. Mallard had heart trouble. The neighbors told Mrs. Mallard carefully. Mrs. Mallard locked herself in a room.
If you look at the grammatical structure of each sentence, you’ll notice that every sentence is an independent clause. This means that each sentence contains a subject followed by its verb.
How does the paragraph sound when you read it out loud?
Here’s the exciting part. You can make these sentences better with your knowledge of clauses. First, you can leave sentence 1 alone. Then, you can make sentence 2 subordinate and attach it to sentence 3, which is an independent clause. Finally, you will leave sentence 4 as it appears. Read the results:
Mrs. Mallard’s husband died in a train crash. Because Mrs. Mallard had heart trouble, the neighbors told her carefully. Mrs. Mallard locked herself in a room.
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| Variety makes things interesting! |
You have made the sentences sound more interesting and increased their flow together with your knowledge of clauses. You began with a simple sentence, created a complex sentence, and finished with another simple sentence. You improved this piece of writing by varying sentence structures.