WRITING LESSON: Five Steps to Writing Excellent High School (and College) Sentences, Paragraphs, and Essays:

1. Try expanding some sentences.
a. use phrases (prepositional, appositive, participle, gerund, and absolute)
b. use dependent clauses (noun, adjective, or adverb clauses
c. use independent clauses (to make compound, complex, compound/complex sentences, and loose and periodic sentences)

2. Add Elegance and Power to the sentence
a. use FAST words
b. use parallelism (repetition, anaphora, epiphora, antithesis, chiasmus)

3. Make the sentence explosive by packing ideas more tightly
a. cut all unnecessary words
b. rearrange sentence to make things tighter, more explosive

4. Polish the sentence
a. spell check
b. punctuation
c. check for typos