ClearTips: Stunning sentences

To start a paragraph or point

Try giving your reader some relief with a five- or ten-word sentence. Like the fragment, it attracts attention. So, use it to open an argument. One of the strongest positions for the short sentence is at the beginning of a paragraph.

Documentary films are a worry. First of all, there's the term "documentary" itself, which was thought clumsy by the very man who invented it, John Grierson.

This short, provocative sentence prompts the reader to ask, Why?

It is quite an achievement. Though Boris Yeltsin is erratic in temperament and unsound in body, and though he had presided over a period of change in which most Russians have grown poorer, they have re-elected him.

Greenpeace used no half-measures. Claiming that old growth forests and many species of wild life were being wiped out, it called for all clear-cutting to stop, and no more new forest roads.

But others aren't so sure. "We have yet to find evidence that the introduction of new technology in schools raises test scores," says the Abell Foundation's Kate Walsh. Even some advocates, like consultant Margaret Riel, concede that test scores don't prove the case for computer networking.

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