Fancy Sentence Forms in Essays

Students write tons of essays and other papers while in school or college. Why do you think teachers assign them?

No, they don't want to drive you crazy and make you hate writing for the rest of your life. The purpose is to help you grow critical thinking skills and the ability to formulate thoughts in a coherent, reasoned, and logical manner. While in college, you learn to deliver opinions and persuade others in your arguments. Such a skill will help in your after-school life and career, agree?

I know that many students don't like academic writing. They can't understand the difference between those numerous essay and research paper types. It's often challenging for them to build texts, even if it's personal, reflective essays on what makes them happy, for example.

Indeed, some forms of college writing seem old-fashioned. Who needs to know what you did last summer, right? Yet, those traditional writings help you practice various formal sentence patterns:

None of them will go in vain when you deal with business writing, emails, and other official papers on your career path after graduation.

What are these sentence patterns?

First, I'll show you the often sentence structure mistakes to avoid. Then, let's reveal the classic sentence frameworks and fancy patterns to consider for stellar essay writing.

5 sentence structure mistakes to avoid in papers

1. Fragments.
2. Run-on sentences.
3. Starting with similar conjunctions.
4. Too short sentences in a row.
5. Too long sentences.

Fragments lack the proper subject-predicate core. When writing a sentence, ensure you mention both elements and create a subject-predicate unit.

Example:

• Wrong: Hard to predict AI's role in education.
• Right: Scholars still find it hard to predict AI's role in education.

Run-on sentences are those with several subject-predicate units lacking the proper conjunctions. As a result, bad writing appears, and the reader can't understand your message. To fix such sentences, break them down or divide them with the proper conjunctions or punctuation.

Example:

• Wrong: I hate this movie, it's so boring.
• Right: I hate this movie because it's boring.
• Right: I hate this movie. It's so boring.

Starting sentences with conjunctions is not a mistake. Yet, several such sentences in a row make your writing look unprofessional and monotonous. You can rewrite your paragraph for better readability: Eliminate excess conjunctions and working.

Example:

• Wrong: The articles were similar. And the facts from there were evident to researchers. And that's why the researchers pointed it out in reports.
• Right: The articles were similar. Researchers pointed out the evident facts from those articles in their reports.

Short sentences are not taboo when you balance them with long ones in your essay paragraphs. Too many short sentences in a row make your text bumpy and hard to read. More than that, you need to communicate complex thoughts and arguments in academic papers, which is challenging to do with short sentences only.

Instead of using super short, simple sentences, wrap them into longer (20-25 words), well-balanced phrases.

Example:

• Wrong: Write short sentences. They are simple. They help avoid mistakes. Short sentences are intense. They aid clarity.
• Right: Short sentences are simple and straightforward, helping you avoid mistakes. Use them to communicate a clear and intense message to the audience.

If you want to write perfect body paragraphs, balance long sentences in your essays. Resist the temptation to look smart through the number of words you place in a sentence. Otherwise, a reader will get lost in your message, and you'll lose the idea you wanted to convey.

Make each sentence as long as it needs to be to communicate an idea or an argument to the audience.

3 fancy sentence frameworks for wow sentences

1. Cumulative sentences: Write the core idea first and add details illustrating it afterward.
2. Periodic sentences: Details go first, finalizing the core idea.
3. Balanced sentences: Two ideas with similar structures meet in one sentence. Perfect for clauses illustrating the contrast. For example:

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty." (Winston Churchill)

By the way, semicolons can make your writing life easier. Do not hesitate to use them in complex sentences when appropriate: A semicolon works well to clarify the relation between two parts of one sentence.

Fancy sentence patterns to use in essays

Ready?

The art of writing well-structured and reasoned paragraphs will come in handy in your future life and career. Until then, why not practice these fancy sentence forms to impress your teacher?

About the author:

Lesley Vos is a private educator and online tutor for high school students, teaching them to pay attention to messages they communicate to the world. She is also a professional web writer contributing to many websites on education, student life, and college survival.

You can find more works of Lesley on Twitter @LesleyVos.