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Sentence Skills, Form A book cover
Sentence Skills, Form A, 7/e
John Langan, Atlantic Cape Community College
Sentence Variety 1

Writing On and Offline

These writing prompts are followed by text boxes for your input. If you are working online and your instructor has given you the go-ahead, you can send your work to him or her by clicking the "Submit Answers" button. If you are working offline, you will have to copy your answers (CTRL-C on most systems) and paste them (CTRL-V) into a text document to retain a record of your work.





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Activity 1:

Directions: This activity will help familiarize you with how professional writers vary their sentences. Visit any or all of the following sites and find an essay that interests you.

The New York Times Magazine

The Atlantic Monthly

Salon Magazine

New Scientist

The Smithsonian

Note the kinds of sentences the author uses. Does he or she use one more frequently than the others, or is there a good balance?
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Activity 2:

Go to a search engine such as Yahoo! or Lycos, and find some sites about lemons. Read a little bit about lemons, and then write a brief report on them--but use only one kind of sentence. That is, your lemon report should include only simple, compound, complex sentences, or even compound-complex. Did you find this activity challenging?








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