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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

Writing well at the sentence level

When you write, you write using sentences. A lot of how well you write depends on how ‘good’ your sentences are. So, what makes a ‘good’ sentence?

You need to vary your sentences to help keep them interesting. There are lots of ways you can vary your sentences - you can, for example, vary their length, their topic, or their voice. A piece of writing which has all short sentences isn’t particularly pleasant for someone to read:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was a dinosaur. It was a carnivore. It lived about 65 million years ago. It could weigh up to seven tonnes. It could grow to 12 metres long.

Yuck! This sort of writing is very stop-start, and rather repetitive with all those short sentences. You can improve it a lot by turning some of the sentences into independent clauses, and joining them to other sentences using coordinating conjunctions like ‘and’:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was a dinosaur and was a carnivore. It lived about 65 million years ago. It could weigh up to seven tonnes and could grow to 12 metres long.

That’s a bit better. However, we can still improve it even further. The first sentence says that T-Rex was two things - a ‘dinosaur’ and a ‘carnivore’. So, what type of dinosaur was T-Rex? T-Rex was a ‘carnivorous dinosaur’.

Tyrannosaurus Rex was a carnivorous dinosaur. It lived about 65 million years ago. It could weigh up to seven tonnes and could grow to 12 metres long.

Hmmm...reading a lot better now, but still room to improve. Look at the first two sentences - one starts with ‘Tyrannosaurs Rex’ and one starts with ‘it’. The subject of both sentences is T-Rex. In the first sentence we use its name. In the second sentence we use the pronoun ‘it’ to refer to T-Rex. We can combine these two sentences into one by using a different pronoun like ‘that’:

Tyrannosaurus Rex was a carnivorous dinosaur that lived about 65 million years ago. It could weigh up to seven tonnes and could grow to 12 metres long.

Finally, we have this short piece of writing in a nice form.

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