I feel like public school is really bad at giving you the tools you need to write a good paragraph, so here are a few things to add to your author tool belt regarding sentence variety and flow! The first thing I’d like to get out of the way is the types of sentences.
Simple Sentence: A sentence with a subject and a predicate. For example: Sally (subject) went to the store. (predicate)
Compound Sentence: Two simple sentences joined with but, and, so, etc. For example: Sally went to the store and bought some cheese. We know this is a compound sentence because one, it has a joining word, and more importantly, this sentence can be broken down into two simple sentences. Sally went to the store. She bought some cheese.
Complex Sentence: A sentence that usually has a subordinate clause or subordinate conjunction to add extra detail. For example: Sally drove to the store while listening to music. Another form of this sentence can be: While listening to music, Sally drove to the store. Notice that I’ve put a comma after music because ‘while’ is a dependent clause, meaning it can’t stand on it’s own. While listening to music is a sentence fragment.
With all of these types, you can create a paragraph with a variety of sentences and make it sound more interesting. For example: Sally noticed that she had ran out of cheese. She decided to go to the store. She listened to music. She bought some cheese from the store.
Notice this sentence is choppy and repetitive, because I used only simple sentences. Now let’s see what this paragraph looks like with more sentence variety: Sally noticed that she was out of cheese, so she decided to go to the store. While listening to music, she picked out what cheese she wanted to buy. Then she left the store.
This paragraph is much more interesting now that we’ve used some sentence variety. I hope you can use this information to your advantage! I can’t wait to read your stories.
