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 :)
Vicky,
I'm not sure there are any easy answers! You seem to have identified some of the problem areas, adverbs in particular can be an easy option. I think you have to try and show how someone is looking sheepish for example. Describe their movements, mannerisms to indicate a sheepish reaction. Starting too many sentences with he or she can be repetitive and using the proper noun isn't always the answer. I have looked for other ways to say things rather than he or she. The other thing with sentence structure is to mix up long and short sentences, without too many of either category.
I hope that helps, it is all experience at the end of the day.