Sentence-Combining Practice (Grades 7-11)

Any form of writing - description, narration, exposition, or persuasion - can become more interesting and effective through sentence combining. An excellent approach to developing students' writing style is practicing sentence combining, which involves combining short, choppy sentences into longer, smoother, and more complex ones. With more writing choices, students will have more ways to express their ideas with unique style.

There are two kinds of sentence-combining exercises in Sentence Combining Practic: signaled and unsignaled. Signaled exercises give students specific suggestions on how to combine groups of sentences, called clusters. Unsignaled (or open) sentence clusters encourage students to experiment on their own.

Answer keys are included.