A Little Variety, A Little Spice

What makes an essay, a research paper, a case study, or a novel easier and more fun to read? What makes us think, “This is so much easier to grasp than that other boring, dense material we are forced to read most of the time?”

The answer: Sentence variety.

Of course, everyone has read those really long, elaborate sentences where we have to take deep breaths just to continue reading them, and then have to read them again because we still do not know what it said because there is so much information, jargon, and complexity to it – much like this one.

Break it up. It makes the information easier to comprehend the first time. The reader recognizes this unconsciously most of the time, don’t you think?

By interspersing different types of sentences – declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamatory, simple, compound and complex – your writing becomes more aesthetically pleasing to the readers’ eye...and mind, for that matter.

That is just the way it is. So, do it. Do we not want to make our writing more appealing to our readers in whatever way we can? That is what we are always trying to do, especially when we are shooting to get a good grade!

The best way to check for this is to read our writing aloud. Listen to our voices and pay attention to when we have to take a deep breath just to finish the sentence. Most times this tells us that we are connecting too many ideas in one sentence. Essentially, we are attempting to cram as much information as possible in one sentence instead of breaking it up.

Again, break it up.  Add a little variety, a little spice to the writing! It will change life as we know it, and make our readers happy and able to comprehend what we are saying the first time around.