ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Starting with a conjunction

An obvious way to break a long sentence or two or three independent clauses is to make each clause a sentence. Not so obvious is keeping the conjunction at the start of the next sentence (or two). This has the added advantage of preserving the link between them. True, some of you will be aghast at such flouting of the dictates of your seventh-grade teacher. But what was common two hundred years ago (see Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations) is again in vogue (see The Economist).

I fear my memories, of which, good and bad, I have far too many. But lost friends are better honored with smiles than with tears. And having too many memories is better than having too few.

As a single sentence, this could have been a blur. Instead, the periods do their work of separating the three clauses, making them easier to grasp. And the opening conjunctions do their work of linking the three clauses.

Many people choose not to know. But what happens when your entire genetic closet is flung open during a routine physical?

The bosses of the world's biggest firms have great freedom to run them as they see fit, and it is almost impossible to compare their decisions to alternatives that were not—and never will be—taken. Nor is it easy to separate their personal contributions from plain luck.

You may open a sentence with Nor when it follows a sentence with a negative verb phrase (generally with the word not in it) . . .

A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book.

. . . or with the equivalent, as with will be unable, which is the same as will not be able.

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