Sentence Variety: How Do I Refine My Writing?

Have you ever ordered a dish in a restaurant and been not happy with its taste, even though it contained most of your favorite ingredients? Just as a meal might lack the finishing touches needed to spice it up, so too might a paragraph contain all the basic components but still lack the stylistic finesse required to engage a reader. Sometimes writers have a tendency to reuse the same sentence pattern throughout their writing. Like any repetitive task, reading a text that contains too many sentences with the same length and structure can become monotonous and boring. Experienced writers mix it up by using an assortment of sentence patterns, rhythms, and lengths.

In this chapter, you will look at introducing sentence variety into your writing, how to open sentences using a variety of techniques, and how to use different types of sentence structure when connecting ideas. Each section also contains the punctuation to keep you from creating sentence structure errors. In academic writing (and work situations), these techniques can bring life and make your writing more enjoyable to read.