Second, if you are going to have long paragraphs one after another, you want to find ways to change up their internal rhythm so they don’t feel or sound exactly the same. One way of doing this is by using punctuation. Have one paragraph with a lot of short, strong sentences. Have the next paragraph be one long, winding sentence.

The novelist John Gardner gave some good advice about variety in sentences (Gardner 1983, 104). Become self-conscious, he said, about how much you’re putting into each part. An English sentence has grammatically speaking three parts: subject, verb, object. Thus: subject = “An English sentence”; verb = “has grammatically speaking” (“grammatically sp