It’s hardly necessary to say that dull writing doesn’t sell. For example, who would want to read this?

Sam took off his sneakers and waded into the water. Susan took off her flip flops and also waded in. Steve took off his sunglasses and watched from the shore. Sally shouted to Sam and Susan to be careful.

And, of course, we would all go stark raving mad while reading these repetitious, dull sentences. Good sentences are lively and appealing, and this article is about making sentences jump to life and keeping readers interested.

There are three keys to enlivening sentences and paragraphs, turning mundane ones into interesting ones.

Vary sentence construction

Alter sentence length

Eliminate repetitious words or phrases

This story, with the details changed, appeared in a major newspaper.

Two men robbed the Commerce Bank of Florida at 401 West Kennedy Blvd. Friday morning, police said. The suspects wore ski masks as they burst into the bank with guns drawn, police said. The men aimed their guns at bank tellers and demanded and received an unknown amount of cash. The men then ran to a waiting vehicle, police said.

There are three major issues.

The first is that all four sentences use the same subject-verb construction near the beginning—men robbed, suspects wore, men aimed, and men ran.

The second issue is that the first three sentences are about the same length, 17, 16, and 17 words.

The final issue is repetition—the second, third, and fourth sentences all begin with the. Furthermore, the word men occurs four times, bank three times, and guns twice. Also, the phrase police said occurs three times. (More than likely, the writer was trying to protect his newspaper from libel by attributing negative information to police. But there was no need to attribute more than once.)

Let’s resolve all three issues by rewriting the paragraph. We’ll also add white space for easy reading.

     Two men robbed the Commerce Bank of Florida at 401 West Kennedy Blvd. Friday morning.

     According to police, the suspects wore ski masks as they burst in with guns drawn. They aimed their weapons at tellers and demanded cash.

     After getting an unknown amount of money they ran to a waiting vehicle.

The improvements are:

Only two sentences start with a subject-verb construction—men robbed and they aimed.

All four sentences now start with different words

Two average-length sentences, 15 words each, are followed by a short sentence, nine words, which breaks up the pattern nicely. The passage then concludes with a slightly shorter than average sentence, 13 words

The words police, men, bank, and guns occur only one time each

There’s one more note on the rewriting—I didn’t change the meaning. I’m still telling the same story but making it more interesting to read.

Extra Tip: It’s easy to inadvertently repeat words or phrases, so here is a simple way to check if you are. Press CTRL + F in Microsoft Word and type a word or phrase in the Navigation field. Then click the “Results” link and Word will show you how many times the word or phrase in question appears.