Overview

An excellent approach to developing your writing style is practicing sentence combining, which involves combining short sentences into longer, more complex ones. Longer sentences are not always more effective. However, with more writing choices, you will have more ways to express your ideas with unique style.

Any form of writing—description, narration, exposition, or persuasion—can become more interesting and effective through sentence combining. To make more complex sentences, you can delete repeated words, use connecting words, rearrange words, or change the form of words. Each different way of combining sentences creates a different emphasis. The sentence-combining strategy you choose should depend on the context, your purpose for writing, and your audience. You can vary the length of your sentences, working for a rhythmic balance of long and short sentences in a paragraph. You can also vary the structure of your sentences or create emphasis by experimenting with parallelism. Interruptions caused by punctuation also affect emphasis. Another way to create emphasis is to use unusual sentence patterns, such as reversed clauses.