English Language Exam tips - How Do You Vary Your Sentence Types For Better Writing?

by Michael Hartland

I'VE RECENTLY been giving some tips, especially designed for students about to take summer exams, but relevant to anyone wanting to improve their English.

Today’s post is about varying sentence types.

In my experience as an English teacher and tutor, most students do not understand the basic grammatical structures of sentences.  This is true even of very bright students.

You can only get so far without understanding grammar.  Without this grammatical understanding, you can’t access more complex structures and more sophisticated punctuation.

If you read the following, you’ll see five different sentence types in use:

Really?  Students write sentences all the time.  Many rely on simple sentence forms and this can make their writing unambitious.  Complex sentences, which require more exact punctuation, are rarely used.  Multiple complex sentences, which are really quite advanced sentence structures, are usually unheard of, but this means that students, who are quite capable of writing them, might not be accessing the highest grades.

You can find out more about how I help students develop their writing in my ebook The Five Sentence Type Workbook here, and in my other guides, But I'm No Good At Creative Writing! here and A Dash of Punctuation here.

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