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Have you ever had trouble getting to sleep? What can you do about that?
The remedy most common in cartoons is to start counting sheep jumping
over a fence: one sheep, two sheep, three sheep. You get the idea. It’s the
boredom of the repetition that helps you drift off to dreamland.

What if you want to put someone else to sleep? Let’s say you have a
younger brother or sister you have to take care of one night. What would
you do? Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is a bedtime story. The
important point here is that your tone of voice when you read this story
should be gentle, even, quiet, and repetitive. It’s not that the story is
Source: Cant sleep... #insomnia #leopard
necessarily boring, but the sound of your voice reading the story should #leopardprint #bedtime #goodnight, teefaye, Flickr
become almost a murmur. You would certainly not want to act out the story
using different voices and sound effects. You want to read in a voice that sounds repetitive.

What if you wanted to put readers to sleep? You wouldn’t necessarily want to do such a thing. Good writers want
to keep their readers awake, but what would you do if you did want to put readers to sleep? If you can figure out
what will put readers to sleep, you can avoid it and keep them interested.

Repetition is the key to putting yourself to

sleep, and it plays an important part in
putting someone else to sleep. Repetition in
writing is offering the same type of sentence
over and over, one sentence after another.

To keep your reader awake, you need some

variety. One source of variety in your writing
is variety of sentence structure.

In this lesson, you are going to practice

recognizing sentences that need to be
revised to add variety and revising
sentences by using additions and sentence
Source: _MG_1125, Phil MV, Flickr combining.

To review sentence variety and sentence

combining, look back at the following two lessons in the Related Resources: Editing: Use a Variety of Correctly
Structured Sentences—Compound, Complex, Compound-Complex and Revision Strategies: Strengthen
Sentence Variety.

https://www.texasgateway.org/resource/strengthen-sentence-varietysentence-combining-practice-2-english-ii-writing 1/1