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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

Modifiers

A modifier is any word, phrase or clause that is used in a sentence to describe something. Two of the most common modifiers are adjectives and adverbs - adjectives describe nouns or pronouns, whereas adverbs describe verbs.

Modifiers are one of your best friends in keeping your writing varied and interesting. They can turn boring, straightforward sentences into interesting ones.

The elephant moved quickly.

While this sentence does tell the reader something, it’s not exactly the most interesting sentence. We can make it more interesting by tacking on a modifier:

Despite its large bulk, the elephant moved quickly.

We’ve added some more information about the elephant and put some contrast into the sentence - talking about how an animal can still move quickly even though you would think its large weight would slow it down.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Adjectival modifiers