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Writing well at the sentence level

Combining short and long sentences

Modifiers

Adjectival modifiers

Adjectival clause

Adverbial modifiers

Adverbial clause

Types of phrases

Participle phrase

Prepositional phrase

Absolute phrase

Infinitive phrase

Flowing from one sentence to the next

Contrast

Comparison

Summarise

Emphasise

Addition

Cause and effect – leading to a conclusion

Examples

Sense of time

Sense of position or direction

Sentence fragments

Use of the dash

Combining short and long sentences

Most people know that having all short sentences doesn’t look very good. However, they often overreact and make all their sentences long and complicated. This can look bad as well, and make you appear like you’re trying too hard:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was huge, so large in fact that it could look into a second story window if it walked down your road, assuming that it was still around in modern times.

This sentence is too long. The information could be presented to the reader much more effectively by breaking this sentence up into a combination of short and long sentences:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was huge. It was so large in fact that it could look into a second story window if it walked down your road. This is, of course, assuming that T-Rex was still around in modern times.

The first sentence is short and to the point - establishing what you’re going to talk about - T-Rex’s size! The next two sentences are longer.

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