We began this lesson talking about ways to make your writing more interesting by combining shorter sentences into longer, more complex ones. Now, let’s see how this might work in the real world.

Consider an assignment that asks you to write a persuasive essay. A first draft might look something like this:

The first thing you might notice is that there are several short sentences. They have important information, but the information seems to come in spurts and is not as smooth as it could be. We can combine some of these sentences to help improve this draft by using the subordinating conjunctions below. Notice that the ones listed express certain conditions. For example, as soon as expresses something that occurs as a result of the passage of time.

As, because, and that are used to show cause.

Although, as, just as, though, and while are used to make comparisons.

Where and wherever refer to place.

Even if, if, in case, and unless indicate a condition must be met.

After, as soon as, as long as, before, once, still, till, until, and when relate to time.

Now, read the first sentence of the draft you read earlier.

This seems like a fine sentence. It introduces a subject (Joe Perry) and tells something about him. Now, read the next sentence.

Keeping in mind what we have discussed about sentence combining, we could join these two sentences with the subordinating conjunction because. The result is as follows:

Now, move on to the next few sentences in the draft.

Joe Perry is the football coach. He coaches eighth-grade football. Eighth-grade football was new to me. Perry helped me with my football problems.

We have some work to do to make this message more powerful. We can combine some of these sentences, and there are several ways to do it, given that writing is a creative process. As long as we follow the English conventions discussed in this lesson, we could choose different ways of combining the sentences, depending on what we want to convey. Here is one possibility:

Choosing a subordinating conjunction is dependent on your message. One way to choose the right one is to look at subordinating conjunctions in a chart such as the one at the beginning of this section. Reading through the chart while keeping in mind the message you want to convey to readers is a pretty straightforward way to go about it. For example, you could glance at the chart, choose a subordinating conjunction, and plug it into your sentence to see if it fits your meaning. Let’s say you choose whenever. Plugging it into your sentence would look like this:

Chances are you would stop there because it sounds incorrect. Eighth-grade football being a new thing to you is not a time-dependent kind of thing, is it? If it is new to you on a Monday, it would still be fairly new to you on Tuesday. In that case, you might go through the list and plug in other options that don’t have to do with time. You could go on like this until you land on a subordinating conjunction that fits your meaning just right.

Think of subordinating conjunctions like sign posts. They give your reader hints about the direction a sentence is going to take.