One of the keys to good writing is sentence
variety and one easy way to achieve greater variety in your writing is to
switch sentence parts around.
English sentences, as you may have noticed,
are made up of blocks.
Or we could say: English sentences are made
up of blocks, as you may have noticed.
Or we could say: As you may have noticed,
English sentences are made up of blocks.
Let’s look at this sentence structure:
Pete
went to Japan to learn Judo.
The clause ‘to learn Judo’ explains why
Pete went to Japan. We can move it to the front of the sentence:
To
learn Judo, Pete went to Japan.
Now we have a more sophisticated sentence
structure! Let’s see a couple more examples:
I
need more eggs to make this cake.
To make this cake, I need
more eggs.
They
offered discounts to attract customers.
To attract customers, they
offered discounts.
We can use the same trick with ‘in order
to’:
They
offered discounts in order to attract more customers.
In order to attract more
customers, they offered discounts.
We can also use this technique with certain
sentences with FOR:
Pete
went to the Bahamas for a break from his work.
For a break from his work,
Pete went to the Bahamas.
Jennifer
bought some mackerel for her fish pie.
For her fish pie, Jennifer
bought some mackerel.
Finally, we can do this with prepositional
phrases:
The birds were
singing in the trees.
In the trees, the birds were singing.
There was a
fight at the stadium.
At the stadium, there was a fight.
