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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

Sentence fragments

Although in olden times sentence fragments were a big ‘no no’ in formal writing, some people nowadays think that limited and appropriate use of them is OK. Personally, I don’t think so, but here are some examples of where a lot of people would consider using them to be OK:

Tyrannosaurus Rex has long been considered a vicious predatory dinosaur by experts. Not any more. Experts now believe ...

I would consider this sort of writing acceptable in a newspaper or journal article, but not in a formal essay. However, as always, the person marking your work decides whether it’s acceptable or not, so find out what they prefer.

Click here to move on to the next topic: Use of the dash