Writing with sentence variety. Before you write about your routine, I want to talk to you about sentence variety. What is sentence variety? Variety means having different types. A verb we often use with variety is very. Which paper has more variety? A or B? A. Your eye is drawn to A more because variety makes things interesting. This is the same with our writing. Let's look at some of my writing about my after-work routine. After I get home, I say hello to my daughter and husband. After I change my clothes, we go for a walk. When we get home, my daughter eats dinner. While she eats, my husband prepares our dinner. Before we eat, we give my daughter a bath and put her to bed. As soon as she goes to bed, we eat dinner. How did that paragraph sound to you? To me, it sounds repetitive, and boring because for one thing there's no variety. All of the sentences have the adverb class first, and the independent clause next. This sameness can even cause people to stop paying attention. Also, every dependent clause is a time clause. I only tell you what happens when, not how, or why it happens. Let's make sure that this doesn't happen to you in your writing. Here are some tips for sentence variety. One, vary your sentence types and patterns. Two vary the types of adverb clauses that you use. First, let's talk about sentence types and patterns. Earlier in this course, you learned that there are three very basic types of sentences. Simple sentences have one subject-verb group. Compound sentences have two subject-verb groups joined by a comma, and a coordinating conjunction, like and. Complex sentences have two subject-verb groups. One of the groups begins with a subordinating conjunction, like because. Simple sentences have one subject-verb group that is an independent clause or an IC. They can be very simple like I take a walk. They can have an extra phrase at the beginning, like in the evening. They can have a compound subject like my husband and I. Or they can have a compound subject, and two verbs like take and cook. They can look many different ways. But notice in the last sentence that although there are two verbs, they both go with the same subject. My husband and I. Because these subjects and verbs all go together as one subject-verb group, they are all simple sentences. Compound sentences are two independent clauses put together into one sentence with a comma, and a word like and in between, and is a coordinating conjunction. These words that we often call FANBOYS for and nor, but, or, yet, so. Here are some examples of compound sentences. Notice that there are two separate subject-verb groups with a comma and a coordinating conjunction in the middle. Each of these clauses in these sentences is independent. It can stand on its own as a sentence. By now you're very familiar with this third sentence type because adverb clauses come in complex sentences. You know that they can look like this with an independent clause first, and a dependent clause second, or like this with the depending class first, and the independent clause second. These are the two basic types of complex sentences with adverb clauses. However, remember, we can also have a complex sentence with two dependent clauses. It starts with a dependent clause and a comma continues with an independent clause, and ends with another dependent clause like this. When Emily gets home, she practices gymnastics because she wants to stand on her hands. Or even though Emily loves gymnastics, she doesn't have much time to practice after she comes home from work. Writing a complex sentence with two adverb clauses is great because you can pack a lot of information into one syntax. Now, there's one more type of sentence that I want to tell you about. It's the compound-complex sentence. It always has three subject-verb groups. One pattern of compound-complex sentence looks like this. There's a dependent clause first, then two independent clauses joined together with a comma, and a FANBOYS coordinating conjunction for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. Because this part of the sentence is compound and there's a dependent clause, it's both a complex and a compound sentence. Here's an example. When Emily gets home she lifts weights, and she rides her bike. The sentence can also look like this with the compound part first. When Emily gets home, she lifts weights, and she rides her bike. We've learned about simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence patterns. Wow, look at all those different ways to write a sentence. Let's look back at my boring paragraph. Every sentence is a complex sentence with an ACIC pattern. Now, look at this. We have a DCIC complex sentence, a complex sentence with two dependent clauses, an ICAC complex sentence, a compound-complex sentence, and a simple sentence. We have a variety of sentence types and patterns. It's starting to sound smoother and more interesting. However, there's still a problem. Every adverb clause is a time clause. This leads me to my second sentence fluency tip, vary the types of adverb clauses you use. Remember these? When you explain your details with different types of adverb clauses, you add variety to the ideas you describe. Here, I've taken a few activities, going outside, and eating dinner. I've added adverb clauses of purpose, reason, and condition to explain why, and how I do these things. Now I'm starting to give you a lot more information about my routine. To review we've seen a few important sentence variety tips. In the next video, we'll practice together with this so that you can feel confident writing with a variety of sentence types.
