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When slush reading I ran into a lot of stories with little variation of sentence structure. Noun(subject)-verb-noun(object).
He did a thing. She went somewhere. I ate food.
They may be long sentences joined with the basic conjunctions (and, but, or), but little variation beyond the “Subject-verb” combos of basic sentences. And that got BORRRRRING!
Don’t be boring.
In combat or quick action, short and sweet sentence structures work. On the other hand, narrative should have longer structures, with phrases and additions at the beginning or end.
WRITING EXERCISE:
- Write seven sentences describing a task you did today.
- Now figure out which parts of speech each of the words within the sentences are – noun, verb, adverb, adjective, etc..
- Review the nouns of the sentences and figure out the subject and the objects.
- How many of the sentences have just basic sentence structure?
- How can you vary the sentences to mix up the pace of the subject-verb sentences.
Additional Help
Not every teacher is effective at teaching sentence structure to every type of learner. If sentence structure is not a lesson which was taught in a manner you could grasp when you were school age, you may want to look at the below. They are written in three different styles so hopefully one will click with you.
The Write Life – How to Vary Your Sentence Structure (And Stop Boring Your Readers) by Ali Luke (2019 Sept 21) –
