Sloppy Sentence Starters
At the beginning of each semester, a fair number of my student writers relied on “The Sloppy Seven” sentence starters. In any given paragraph, most of their sentences began with The, I, He, She, They, We, As, or It. Each student had his or her favorites. Dave (name changed) started three out of five sentences in one essay with The. Ellie (name changed) started four out of six with I. So the students could see, at a glance, how frequently they used them, I highlighted the words they repeated.
For example:
My niece is passionate about horses. She loves to brush them and braid their manes and tails. She doesn’t even complain about mucking out the stalls. She takes lessons twice a week and goes to competitions. My sister pays the bills, so she hopes my niece outgrows this hobby. I bet someday she’ll be buying a horse.
As I taught other ways to begin sentences, my students varied their first words and found that this automatically varied their sentence structures, too! More rhythmic, more sophisticated, better-written paragraphs resulted. And these were more interesting to readers. Continue reading A “Dirty Dozen” Ways to Begin Sentences and Get Rhythm
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