Source: chalk board, Hey Raeh, Flickr
You may have seen drawings or cartoons of a student writing the same sentence over and over on a chalkboard as a penalty for some misbehavior in the classroom. Your grandparents may have described such a scene from their elementary or middle school years. The sentence assigned may have been something like “I will not talk in class.” Teachers intended the monotony and repetition of this punishment to remind students of the rule and prevent them from breaking it again. When it comes to revising your essays, however, you need to avoid writing and revising every sentence the same way over and over again.
In this lesson, you will learn strategies for evaluating the quality of the sentences in an essay and making changes to achieve greater sentence variety and effectiveness. To avoid boring your audience and to decrease repetition, you will add “branches” at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of your sentences. As the lesson progresses, you will build up your sentences by using various parts of speech and by combining sentence parts such as subjects and predicates (verbs). When you demonstrate greater variety in your sentence construction, your writing will be more likely to hold your audience’s attention.
Maybe you've come across this old diary entry.
I was talking in class. It was English class. The teacher caught me. She is so strict. I had to stay after school. I had to write the same sentence over and over. I had to write it 100 times. The sentence was “I will not talk in class.” I got really tired. I was also bored. I thought I would never finish. I thought the punishment was unfair. I was angry about it. I will never talk in class again!
Now, look at the same paragraph with revisions that make it less repetitive and more interesting and timely.
Busted again! My English teacher, the strictest teacher in the school, caught me talking in class when I should have been working on the sentence variety assignment. To punish me, she ordered me to stay after school and write the same six-word sentence on the board over and over and over. 100 times! For not working on sentence variety? Seriously? Tired, bored, and angry, I thought I would never finish this unfair punishment. After repetitively writing “I will not talk in class,” I have a new appreciation for sentence variety lessons, and I have vowed that I will never talk in class again.
The revised version implements many methods for revising sentences in an essay.
| Variety in sentence beginnings: | As a punishment Tired, bored, and angry After repetitively writing |
| Purposeful use of deliberate fragments: | Busted again! 100 times! For not working on sentence variety? |
| A short question for dramatic effect: | Seriously? |
| Addition of an appositive phrase: | the strictest teacher in the school |
| Repetition of key terms: | over and over and over |
Now let’s get started learning some sentence variety strategies.