Category: Sentence Structure
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Sentences: Position of Modifiers
To write good sentences, writers must understand what it is that their sentence says. Sentences have a life of their own — they say what the words and word order say, not what the writer might intend them to say, not what the writer might expect everybody to understand as her intent. If a writer […]
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From Here to There: Transitional Devices
Because I’ve been doing a lot of teaching lately, I’ve come to notice that most beginning writers have great difficulty with transitional words and phrases. That is, they don’t use transitional words and phrases. I suspect that one of the reasons so many beginning writers fail to think of and use transitional devices between sentences […]
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Punctuation Marks – 3
The first thing that impressed me about the Harry Potter novels was the story; the second thing that impressed me was J.K. Rowling’s use of semicolons. I was happy to see her punctuate closely related independent clauses with a semicolon. And I have found, when reading some mystery fiction, more semicolons than one would normally […]
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Punctuation Marks: 1
At some point in my third-grade year, I realized that I loved punctuation — it helped me make clear the meaning of whatever I was writing. All those little marks (!, ?, -, —, and ,) were like codes that others could read. And only those who understood the code could understand the sentence! I […]
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Mixing It Up: Four Sentence Types
The sentence is the basic unit of communication. Not the word. Not the paragraph. Not the chapter. It’s the sentence that expresses meaning. Some meanings are simple, others complex. If you want to express different relationships and different levels of meaning, you need to use more than one type of sentence. If you want to […]
Barbara Gregorich 