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Vary sentence structure in writing so that what you write doesn't look like a list of things on the one hand or a long winding sentence that might never end on the other hand.
Varying sentence structure keeps your writing alive and readers interested. As Andrea Lunsford indicates, "Constant uniformity in anything, in fact, soon gets tiresome, while its opposite, variation, is usually pleasing to readers. Variety is important in sentence structures because too much uniformity results in dull listless prose" (189).
Monotonous tone can be avoided by varying:
- sentence types
- sentence openings
- sentence length (Lunsford, 190-191).
Sentence Types
The easiest way to bore readers is to use simple Subject + Verb structure in all sentences. Consider the following example:
Vincent van Gogh was born in the southern Netherlands in 1853 to the family of a Dutch church minister. He started working as an art dealer at the early age of fifteen. He worked there for five years. Vincent fell in love with one of the girls at his boarding house. He finally decided to confess his love for her, but she rejected him. He was devastated. Vincent quit the art gallery and decided that his true passion was to become a pastor.
He lived with his relatives for a while in Amsterdam and prepared to study theology at the university. Vincent failed in his studies. He then worked as a missionary in a coal-mining village in Belgium for a year. His missionary work unfortunately didn't bring him closer to becoming a pastor. Vincent often turned to drawing when life proved hard. He liked to portray the everyday life of ordinary people. In this period, he produced one of his early famous paintings "The Potato Eaters."
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