How to Write Better by Improving Your Sentence Structure

The Importance of Improving Sentence Structure

Imagine seeing all the pieces for a house laid out in front of you. You know roughly where things should go, but putting the pieces in the wrong order won't have a very good final product. You can end up with something that looks like a house but has lots of problems in style and function.

This jumbled box often occurs in our writing as well. We have all the parts that we need, but the order in which they occur leaves us lacking the style we desired and leaves our writing not quite right for our reader.

Why Sentence Structure Matters

There are a number of reasons why sentence structure matters. Sentence structure matters in English because of our use of modifiers. A modifier is a word or phrase that provides description in a sentence. However, putting the modifier in the wrong place can add confusion instead of clarity to your sentence. We can see this with simple modifiers in the wrong place.

I'm pretty sure our friend didn't mean to tell his sweetheart that he was the only person on the planet that loved her. Structure that sentence a bit better and he would have had a much more pleasant result.

Then we have those dangling modifiers.

'To improve his building skills, a video was watched.'

In order to not offend our conscientious observers, a better choice of sentence structure would be:

'In order to improve his building skills, our friend watched a video.'

Good sentence structure helps to eliminate the use of sentence fragments as well. A sentence fragment is an incomplete sentence. These sentences are often incomplete because they are no longer attached to their clauses.

A sentence should be able to stand on its own. If we separate the two sentences, we can easily see that the second sentence is a fragment. We don't really know what 'having a variety' is referring to.

'Having a variety of vegetables can help us consume more of them.'

However, be careful not to err on the side of a run-on sentence to avoid a sentence fragment. A run-on sentence is when two or more independent clauses are joined without the appropriate punctuation or conjunction.

The final of the big three causes of sentence structure problems is using passive voice. Passive voice isn't a grammatical error so much as it makes the sentence harder to follow. In passive voice, the target of an action is put in the subject position even though they aren't doing anything. For example:

The doll is an inanimate object and isn't doing any action in the sentence - Sally is doing the work. So to make the sentence active we would write:

We get to read about action, what's going on and a play-by-play, if you will. It keeps the reader engaged in the piece.

So now that we know the three most common culprits that harm our sentence structure, let's see what we can do to improve them and our overall writing.