What’s the most common sentence pattern in the English language? Every man and his children in grade school should know it’s the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Simple and plain, this is how beginners to the language write.
Want samples of the SVO pattern in action?
- The dog barked at me.
- You played ball.
- We ate hotdogs.
Catch the drift? You probably wrote the same way when you were in first grade, though, so don’t hate the second-language learners still stuck at that level.
If you’re a relatively new English writer, on the other hand, you will probably find yourself writing that way much of the time (apart from using your writing improvement software heavily). Don’t worry. The better you gain proficiency in the vernacular, the less elementary-sounding your writing will become. In the meantime, though, you can do the following things to fix it up.
- Turn the sentence into a question. For the first example, you can say “What did the dog do? It barked!”
- Give it some punch by turning it into an exclamation, as in “Damn, that dog barked at me!”
- Use a transitional phrase, as in “Even though I tried being careful, the dog still barked at me.”
- While not generally recommended, you can turn it into a passive sentence for variation, as in “I was barked at by the dog.”
- Throw in some modifiers, as in “The scary dog barked loudly at me.”
