Prose Style is short for ‘how you use punctuation and different types of sentence to make your writing more interesting.’

Good writers play with the lengths of their sentences to make their writing varied and lively. Want to know why it is important? Study the passage below:

What do you notice about the paragraph above?  That’s right, every sentence is a simple sentence; every sentence is exactly the same length.  You’d soon get pretty tired of reading a story written with a prose style like this, wouldn’t you! 

 
There are five types of sentence:

• Fragments (one of two word sentences – like ‘Bang!’ or ‘He fell.’
• Impact sentences (three or four word sentences – ‘The cat screamed.’ Impact sentences are very useful for building suspense, or when writing an action scene)
• Simple sentences (a sentence without a connective, like ‘the cat sat on the mat’)
• Compound sentences (Sentences with ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ – ‘The cat sat on the mat but he would rather have been lying on the sofa’)
• Complex sentences (long sentences, often using one or more commas. They may also include semi-colons, colons, dashes and brackets).

Note how many different types of sentences are used in the following paragraph:

Did you spot the different types of sentence?

(c) Nick Hitchen 2007

Last updated on August 14, 2007