Professional writers create sentences that are interesting to read, not just for their content, but also for their structure. One way you can make your writing grow is to practice writing sentences more like those professionals write. To that end, the advice offered in Don Killgallon's Sentence Composing for High School is especially useful. Synopsized below are the skills introduced in that book and already practiced in our classes.
Skill 1: Appositive Phrase
The appositive phrase
identifies an adjacent noun or pronoun and occurs in the sentence opener,
subject-verb split or sentence closer position. The appositive adds further
information about the noun or pronoun and thus acts the way an adjective does.
Typically, the appositive is set off by one or two commas (depending on sentence
position), though in some cases one may be set off by a dash or by dashes. The
appositive can be found in the sentence opener, subject-verb split and sentence
closer positions.
Examples (appositive phrases are underlined), all from The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
| By the time we got to Mango Street we were six -- Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me. | |
| Meme has a dog with gray eyes, a sheepdog with two names, one in English and one in Spanish. (an appositive within an appositive) | |
| Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he's tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows. |