Practice in Combining and Arranging Sentences

Find out about sentence combining--a friendly (and generally more effective) alternative to traditional grammar instruction. Then begin developing your sentence-combining skills here at About.com Grammar & Composition.

An introduction to the basic principles and methods of sentence combining.

If you have read our Introduction to Sentence Combining, you're now ready to try your hand at combining sentences to form a complete paragraph--an excerpt from the Gay Talese essay "New York Is a City of Things Unnoticed."

Combine sentences with adjectives and adverbs to build a coherent narrative paragraph.

This exercise will give you practice in building sentences with the basic modifiers: adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases.

This exercise, which has been adapted from Jack London's account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, offers practice in coordinating different sentence elements in the context of complete paragraphs.

If you have read our introduction to sentence combining and practiced building sentences with adjective clauses, you're now ready for this paragraph-building exercise, "Rolling Along with Mr. Bill."

This sentence-combining exercise has been adapted from two paragraphs in "The Dream Animal," a chapter in Loren Eiseley's book "The Immense Journey" (1957). Sentences that can be turned into adjective clauses are in italics. After you have completed this exercise, compare your work with the edited passage on page two.

This sentence-combining exercise has been adapted from two paragraphs in "The Underachieving School," by John Holt. The first paragraph focuses on causes--why and how many children are conditioned to "hate reading." The second paragraph considers the effects of such conditioning. Note that several of Holt's original sentences contain adverb...

This exercise, adapted from a paragraph in Alfred Kazin's memoir, offers practice in combining sentences to create a descriptive paragraph.

This sentence-combining exercise has been adapted from the final chapter of the novel "Mrs. Bridge," by Evan S. Connell.

This combining exercise has been adapted from the last five paragraphs of the essay "My Home of Yesteryear," a place description composed by a nontraditional student. In the original essay, several of the student's sentences contain participial phrases.

This combining exercise invites you to experiment with a variety of sentence structures.

This sentence-combining exercise has been adapted from a narrative paragraph relating the misadventures of a would-be thief. Your job is to combine the sentences in each set of the exercise. Several of the sentences contain participial phrases.

Adapted from a paragraph in Edward Hoagland's essay "Heart's Desire," this combining exercise invites you to experiment with a variety of sentence structures.

Our Glossary of Usage contains more than 150 sets of commonly confused words. To test your familiarity with some of these confusables, complete the following two-step exercise.