How to Avoid Repetitive Sentence Structure

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

“List-like prose" can occur in a variety of ways, and they all have the same result—flat writing.

Writing is more than simply writing down what happens in a scene. Good writing has a musical flow, drawing the reader into and through the paragraph and seamlessly handing them off to the next paragraph. Without that flow, you get a monotonous rhythm that puts readers to sleep:

I ran down to the lake to look for my little sister, Georgia. I found her sitting on the dock, her feet dangling in the water. I yelled for her to come home, but she didn't seem to hear me. I went over and nudged her in the arm. She screamed and fell off the dock into the water. I just laughed.

-Yawn-

4 Ways to Keep Your Sentences From All Sounding the Same

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

A varied sentence structure can help keep your writing from sounding stale and flat.

After eight years of diagnosing pages here, and a few decades of critique experience, I’m quite familiar with issues writers face—from those just starting to write, to those on the brink of selling their novels, and even those with multiple published novels. Some aspects of writing are difficult for almost everyone, and each stage of the author’s journey has its own set of challenges.

One of those challenges is writing sentences that don’t all sound the same.

The Fault in Our Fiction. Avoiding Faulty Parallelism

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Have you ever read a sentence and things just sounded…off? You’re not really sure why, but something doesn’t line up, or worse, it creates a situation that knocks you right out of the story.

One possible reason is faulty parallelism.

Faulty parallelism is when the sentence construction doesn’t align correctly, causing a weird disconnect for readers. Nouns don’t match up with nouns, verbs with verbs, clauses with clauses.

Is Your Second Line as Good as Your First? Making the Most of Your Paragraphs

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

We all know the importance of a great first line. Not just the first line of your novel, but the first line of every chapter and even every scene. If you really want to go crazy, the first line of every paragraph. That’s a lot of pressure for those poor guys.

But what about second lines?

They have it easy. No one pays a lot of attention to them. Readers are already so enamored by that awesome first line, they gloss right over the second, right?

Not really.

Great lines hook. To continue the fishing metaphor, the second line is the strike. The first line intrigues, and the second line captures. The rest of the paragraph is the struggle to land that fish. Get the fish in the boat and it’s yours.