Writing Effective Sentences

Prof ADama

Objective

To help the student write clear and

effective sentences.

The Four Cornerstones of Writing Clear Sentences

Write a clear subject and a clear predicate

Place modifiers close to what is being modified

Use appropriate punctuation

Make sure the meaning can be clearly understood

Use the Appropriate Conjunctions

Conjunctions help you write clear sentences by connecting words or groups of words in a sentence– Coordinating conjunctions: And, but, or…

– Subordinating conjunctions: As, because, if, since,

until, while…

– Conjunctive adverbs: Accordingly, however,

instead…

Examples

Mary traveled to Florida, but she could not visit Disney World.

Mary traveled to Florida because she had an important business meeting.

Mary traveled to Florida to meet some business people; however, she had to return to Puerto Rico before the meeting.

Things to Avoid

Wordiness

The lack of responsibility of John made him fail the class.

VS

John failed the class because of hisirresponsibility.

OrJohn’s lack of responsibility made him fail the

class.

Unnecessary Phrases

Students in the present time have to work to pay for college.

VS

Today, students have to work to pay for

college.

Eliminate Unnecessary Words and Phrases

The movie was kind of disturbing.

VS

The movie was disturbing.

Avoid Saying the Same Thing Twice (Redundancy)

The computer is a new innovation.

VS

The computer is an innovation.

Ways to achieve sentence variety…

By applying the things you have learned in this book you can obtain various effective sentences.

Using sentence variety will keep your story from sounding boring.

Sentence Function

• Declarative: sentences that make a statement, or assertion.

• Imperative: sentence giving direction.

• Interrogative: sentence that seek information in the form of a question.

• Exclamatory: sentence that express strong emotion.

Grammatical Structure

• Simple: sentence that consists of mainly one NP + VP structure.

• Compound: sentence that consists of two or more simple sentences connected by coordinator.

• Complex: sentence that consists of two or more simple sentences connected by subordinators.

• Compound-Complex: sentence that are basically a compound sentence, with subordinate clauses in its coordinate clauses.

Sentence Length

Sentence lengths classified as…– Long Sentence– Short Sentence

To determine if a sentence is long or short, you MUST COMPARE it to all of the sentences you have written.

Your Own Criteria

These are your own observations. Your own ideas.

Can you think of other ways of creating Sentence variety ???

Criterion = Criteria

Classroom Activity pg 144

Working alone or with a partner…

– Improve the sentences of the following paragraph.

Classroom Activity pg 145

Working alone or in pairs…

– Break the following long sentence into a paragraph by using different patterns of sentences.

The End

Revised (January 2005)August 2004