Hi all! Firstly I want to say thank you to everyone who commented on my uploaded piece 'Does He Know?' I found the constructive criticism to be extremely useful and once I'd done the amendments I just agree my piece flowed much better and had more life to it!! One of the amendments however that I am struggling with is sentence structures. The comments stated they are monotonous which having re-read I agree with. My question is how can I vary them? At the moment they are mostly sentences starting like 'Sheepishly Amelia sat up...' or 'She looked at him in awe...' Which as you can tell isn't very varied!! I would be highly grateful for any help! Thank you in advance!
Kind regards Vicky :)
Thank you all so much, Mark do you mind if I use that sentence? I love it and it would work perfectly with the scene! Thank you Michelle I'll have a look :)
Hi Vicky,
I 'm a teacher and do a lot of work with the kids on varying sentence structures to improve their level of work. it might be worth you looking at Alan Peat's stuff. He does a lot of work on sentence types/ structures/ starters and it might give you a starting point- obviously, you'll be writing at a higher level but his ideas are quite good. He is on twitter and has a sentence app out.
Hope this helps
Hi Vicky,
I find in these cases that it can help to describe the rest of the scene a bit, to give the reader some more context in which to place the person: "Thin light cut through gaps in the curtains and the dust broke into a dance as Amelia sat up sheepishly...".
Varying sentence length does help as well, but you need to be aware of how it affects the rhythm and flow of your writing.
Malcolm's right in that there are no easy answers; sometimes you just need to rewrite a few sentences a few times and you'll find it comes together easily enough.
Good luck!