Overview

Combining sentences effectively is a way to develop your writing style and broaden your writing skill. Fortunately, it is a skill that can be practiced.

There are many strategies for combining short sentences into more exciting, complex statements. 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. As a skilled writer, you should always choose the stylistic emphasis that most precisely expresses your aims in the context of an emerging paragraph.

By practicing sentence combining, you can improve your revising and editing skills. The more confidence you have in moving sentence parts around, the more control you can have over the writing process and the finished product. Vary the length of your sentences, working for a rhythmic balance of long and short sentences in a paragraph. Vary the structure of your sentences, using different kinds of introductory clauses to create stylistic variety. Use punctuation—colons, semicolons, dashes, commas, and parentheses—to interrupt sentences for emphasis. You can also shift emphasis by using unusual patterns, such as reversing the normal order of clauses.

Sentence combining is an effective device in all of your writing: description, narration, exposition, and persuasion. Practice it!