Sentence Combining

Often I will start off my sentence combining introduction by asking my class, “What makes a sentence a good sentence?” or “What are the characteristics of a good sentence?” More often than not, I will be greeted by blank stares and confused looks, which is by no means unusual in my classes. But I usually manage to wait them out until I get some response like, “Sentences are good if they are descriptive,” or “A sentence is a good sentence if it contains a complete thought.” However, if I am really patient, I almost invariably get the answer, “Short sentences are good sentences.” Too often students have been taught by teachers who don’t know any better (or who don’t know how to deal with “awkward” sentences, fragments, and run-ons) that they should write with short sentences. Consequently, I have to spend the rest of my semester not only breaking bad habits but also teaching good sentence maturity through sentence combining. Research shows that as students progress through school their sentence length grows in direct proportion to the level of advancement in the school system; grammar school students write very short sentences, high school longer, college even longer and professional writers the longest of them all. But how are those mature sentences structured? Professionals use what are called sentence modifiers like verbal and appositive phrases, and adjective clauses. These descriptive modifiers allow writers to develop the complete thoughts that my students insightfully pointed out and to do it in a way that makes their writing flow with a rhythm that engages the readers’ attention and keeps them from getting lost in clauses that seem to weave back and forth and go nowhere. Working with these structures has the additional advantage of curing some of the grammar and syntax problems that English teachers find so vexing, problems that convinced them to counsel students to simplify their lives by chopping up their sentences. Research shows that sentence combining is the most effective technique to teach sentence level maturity.
Some of the following sentence combining exercises are from Sentence-Combining Workbook, available on Amazon.com. (reproduced here by permission of the author, Pam Altman)

UNIT 1: THE BASIC SENTENCE

UNIT 2: SENTENCE FOCUS

UNIT 3: JOINING SENTENCES WITH COORDINATORS

UNIT 4: JOINING SENTENCES WITH SUBORDINATORS

UNIT 5: COMPARISON / CONTRAST

UNIT 6: CONCESSION

UNIT 7: PARALLEL STRUCTURES

REVIEW EXERCISES

UNIT 8: MODIFYING WITH ADJECTIVES

UNIT 9: MODIFYING NOUNS WITH PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES

REVIEW EXERCISES

UNIT 10: MODIFYING NOUNS WITH APPOSITIVES

UNIT 11: MODIFYING NOUNS WITH ADJECTIVE CLAUSES

UNIT 12: MODIFYING WITH VERBAL PHRASES

FINAL REVIEW EXERCISES