This lesson is about the proper use of subordinating conjunctions. Why are we asking you to study something with such a long and seemingly mysterious name?

When you first began to write, chances are you wrote short sentences because short sentences made sense at the time. As you grew older, you may have been asked to write essays in school, and you still wrote shorter sentences because they were an easy, uncomplicated strategy for quickly getting your thoughts into a first draft. Now that your assignments are more sophisticated and complex, however, using a steady diet of short, choppy sentences weakens the effectiveness of your writing. For example, read the following sentences:

Do you see how writing this way can make the writing seem dull, disconnected, and maybe even boring? Why write this way if you don’t have to? Notice what happens if we combine the sentences as follows:

The second example is much smoother and conveys a more interesting message to the reader simply by combining short, choppy sentences into one. If you combine simpler sentences into longer, more complex ones, not only will your writing be more interesting, but it will also have much more variety. Another benefit of combining sentences is that you can communicate more content to your readers because you can efficiently tell them about the relationships between different things.

In the second example above, you saw the benefits of combining sentences by adding “joiner” words called conjunctions. These “joiners” are the subject of this lesson. You will learn to make your writing more interesting by using conjunctions, but you will specifically focus on subordinating conjunctions such as because in the second example above.