Varying your sentence patterns helps you to hold your reader’s interest. Knowing how to use different sentence patterns allows you to chose the form best suited to your meaning. MEB
SENTENCE VARIETY
VARIED BEGINNINGS
BEGIN WITH A PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE:
In the tumultuous business of cutting-in and attending to a whale, there is much running backwards and forwards among the crew. H. Melville, Moby Dick
BEGIN WITH MORE THAN ONE PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE:
On this public holiday, as on all other occasions, for seven years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. N. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
BEGIN WITH A SIMILE:
Like a razor also, it seems massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure. E.A. Poe "The Pit and the Pendulum"
BEGIN WITH AN ADJECTIVE OR SEVERAL ADJECTIVES:
Silent, grim, colossal--the big city has ever stood against its revilers. O. Henry, "Between Rounds"
BEGIN WITH AN APPOSITIVE:
The elephant, the slowest breeder of all known animals, would in a few thousand years stock the whole world. C. Darwin, The Descent of Man
BEGIN WITH AN INFINITIVE
To see her, and to be himself unseen and unknown, was enough for him at present. T. Hardy, Jude the Obscure
BEGIN WITH A MODIFYING CLAUSE:
When little boys have learned a new bad word, they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. R. Kipling, "The Phantom Rickshaw"
BEGIN WITH A NOUN CLAUSE:
What was meant by this ceremony the reader may imagine, who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. B. Harte, "The Luck of Roaring Camp"
BEGIN WITH A PARTICIPLE:
Crawling on all fours, I made steadily but slowly toward them; till at last, raising my head to an aperture among the leaves I could see clear down into a dell beside the marsh, and closely set about with trees, where Long John Silver and another of the crowd stood face to face in conversation. R.L. Stevenson, Treasure Island
BEGIN WITH A SUSPENDED TRANSITION:
Scientists, furthermore, had succeeded in creating life, so that human evolution need no longer be left to chance. A.C. Eurich, "Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century"
VARIED TYPES OF SENTENCES
THE CUMULATIVE SENTENCE: built by addition; it adds details either before or after the main idea has been established.
He showed up in a new car, a brand new Italian sports car, a roaring red sex symbol. M. Collins
The confused shouting that rose so suddenly brought her to her feet and across the front porch without her slippers, hair half braided. K.A. Porter, Noon Wine
He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched them far down the glassy convex surface of the pool, its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. E. Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"
THE BALANCED SENTENCE: very formal and elegant; it is often used in public oratory. It is crafted by balancing two similar ideas in similar words and structures.
And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. J.F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address
THE PERIODIC SENTENCE: builds to a climax; the reader must wait for the end of the sentence before he or she can get the meaning. It is created by suspending part of the sentence, frequently the verb, until the end.
In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for a bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. G. Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"
Thanks to B. Ganley for compiling these sentences from
Memering and Hare's The Writer's Work.