Complete the senteces. use the verbs in their right forms. my friend and i (to be) to the history museum many times lately. you (to do) the classroom very well todat. thank you very much. lisa (to eat) her favourite chocolate cake just now. she cannot be hungry. you ever (to speak) english to a foreigner?

How should you write a sentence?

Well, most guides will start off with 10,000 ways NOT to write a sentence.

You know, the finger-wagging schoolmarm that lectures you about avoiding fragments and comma splices and run-ons.

Ugh. That’s so negative. I prefer to focus on all the beautiful ways that you CAN write a sentence (trust me, there’s a lot!)

What I’m going to show you in this post is a “Sentence Tree.” This is where you start with a single simple sentence, and spin it off into a few variations, and then a few more variations off of that, until you have a whole tree full of branching variations.

And every single one of these sentences is going to be about crocodiles, because it’s easier to see sentence variations when they’re all about the same topic. Plus, crocodiles are fun! Or at least dangerous, which is kind of fun.

And after you’re finished reading this, if you’d like to learn even more about sentences, check out my course, “How to Write a Splendid Sentence.”

And for our initial sentence, let’s start with something simple.

1. SVO Sentence

“That is not a crocodile.”

Now that one’s pretty easy. It’s a SVO sentence. Which means you’re writing “Subject, Verb, Object” in that order and that order alone.

Subject = That

Verb = Is

Object = Crocodile

If you’re just starting out writing sentences, that’s an excellent place to start. It’s clear! It’s direct! Now you know what a crocodile isn’t!

But most of the time, if you just write SVO sentences, they get very, very boring, and you will put all of your readers to sleep.

Once they’re asleep, you have two options: you can shout/wave your hands/blow an air-horn, or … you can write different sentences.

2. Preposition Opening

The next thing you should learn about how to write a sentence is to vary your sentence openings.

For instance, what about starting with a preposition? (Prepositions indicate direction, such as of, to, at, of, above, under…)

“In just a moment, he’d realize he should have obeyed the “no fishing” sign.”

Ah, what a lovely variation! If you slip a preposition sentence inside a paragraph full of SVO sentences, it will feel like a breath of fresh air.

Plus, it works like a mystery — the reader wants to know what’s going to happen in just a moment, and so they’re propelled to read to the end of the sentence, curious about what’s going to happen next.

In just a moment … What? Tell me already! I want to know!

3. Adverb Opening

Let’s look at another sentence variation opener. This time, we’ll use an adverb to launch this sentence.

“Carefully, he put the meat inside the crocodile’s mouth.”

That pause at the beginning of the sentence — a single word followed by a comma — is like the tension before a climax. We want to know exactly what he’s doing that requires such care, and so we keep reading.

Little tiny variations like this don’t seem to matter much, but they have a tremendous affect on the reader. It’s the difference between a reader getting bored and the reader thinking you’re a genius.

And in fact, there’s a whole bucketful of openings we can use on our sentences. If you carefully cycle through a bunch of them, it will go a long way toward not making your reader fall asleep.

And keeping your reader awake is a very good goal to shoot for.

So far, all three our sentences have been pretty short.

Many short sentences in a row get boring.

Your reader’s eyes will start to glaze.

You need to provide some variety.

You need to write a longer sentence. (See — you just got tired of all those short sentences!)

How about we tackle more of a medium-length sentence? And what’s more, we’ll continue to avoid that simplistic SVO order, and try out a different structure.

Before we get to that, watch a video of me talking about sentences. This is the first video in my course, “How to Write a Splendid Sentence,” and I’ll talk about WHY writing great sentences is so important, and how to improve.

4. Standalone/Leaning Sentence

Now we’re going to learn how to write a Standalone/Leaning sentence.

A leaning part of a sentence is one that can’t stand on its own (“While it’s not the best weather…”), while a standalone part of a sentence is one that can function all by itself (“We should still go skiing.”).

“When the zookeeper said she could have what she wanted, he didn’t expect she would bejewel herself.”

We start with the leaning part of the sentence — “When the zookeeper said she could have what she wanted…” (see how that’s not a finished thought?)

Then we end with the standalone part: “He didn’t expect she would bejewel herself.”

What’s great about a standalone/leaning sentence is that you can create a mystery. When you start with a leaning part of a sentence, grammatically the reader is eager to learn about the end of the sentence!

It’s like music when you’re playing an unresolved chord, and the listener is yearning for the resolving chord.

Still, I think we can do even better than that sentence.

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