A little frustrated with your sentence structure? Can’t figure out why your writing just doesn’t seem to have the right ring
to it? Often, this is the result of a lack of variety in sentence structure. If you examine the sentence structure of well-published authors, you’ll see that they tend to use a lot of variety, not only in the structure of their sentences, but also in the length of their sentences. Try out this exercise to help you gain a feel for different kinds of sentence structure.
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Find a passage of prose from your favorite author and copy it down onto paper. As you’re doing so, take note of the way the sentences are put together. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to diagram them — although that wouldn’t be a bad exercise.)
After you’ve copied the passage down, I want you to copy it again. But this time, I want you to change all the words while keeping the sentence structure intact. This might be especially useful if you find a passage of similar length from some of your own writing and then rewrite it using the EXACT same sentence structure as the paragraph you’ve just copied. This means it will have almost the exact same number of words, the exact same punctuation, etc. But it will be a completely different story. Here’s an example of a sentence altered in this way:
Original sentence (from Moby Dick): “Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore.”
Exercise sentence: “Now, with rock-bottom interest rates, to invest in the real estate market is as accessible to the novice investor as to participate in an IRA.”
Notice there are some small differences in sentence structure, but the structure of the sentence as a whole remains intact. If you try this technique out with an entire paragraph, you’ll be surprised at how much you can learn!