How to Vary Sentence Structure
Keep the Reader Interested by Offering Variety
One of the things I had to learn when I first started writing was to vary my sentence structure depending on what my goal was for my scenes.
Varying sentence structure helps with pacing. If every sentence is the same length or begins the same way, this can interfere with the effects you want your scenes to achieve. Your story can begin to sound monotonous.
I didn’t know how to vary my sentences when I first started writing because I had never thought about it. The way I learned to change sentence lengths and structure was by reading novels and seeing how authors did it. You can do that too, and you should analyze your favorite novel and see how the author does it, but for now here are something you can think about when you write and edit.
1. Break up long paragraphs
Begin by looking at your paragraphs first. I am forever telling my students to break up long paragraphs. When I wrote for an online medical journal for a while, I learned that paragraphs online should not be longer than two sentences. That seemed crazy to me, but the editors said that on a screen, readers need to see a lot of white space.
In books, it’s not much different. Paragraphs should be short. But not all of them. Some…
