Listen to learn about what choices you have as a writer in adding variety to your written work.
Source: Jill Walter
The Purpose of INVERSION and FRONTING in Writing
In order to best engage our readers, we want to always keep them guessing not just with our content but with our choices of words and our choices of how to organize our sentencing. This has to do with the syntax of our writing.
The standard order of a sentence will follow the pattern of S+V (subject + verb). Every sentence must have a subject and verb.
When beginning writers think of this standard order (S+V) and the subject leading the way, most often nouns are used. When another part of the sentence is moved from where it normally is in the sentence to the front, we call it fronting or inversion. This new piece of the sentence moved to the front might be the object of a sentence, the compliment of the sentence or even the main verb found in the sentence itself. It's all about the craft of the writer.
Examples:
Most sentences will use this pattern. In order to add better craft to our writing, it is better to vary this order. We do not always have to start with the subject of the sentence. We can use other ways to open our sentences.
One way is to invert (or switch) the subject and the verb. In this case, the order would be V + S (verb + subject). We can see this done most easily with the writing of questions and even when using prepositional phrases to begin our sentences.
Examples:
**Notice that the standard order of S+V is not used.
More examples of prepositional phrases that begin a sentence:
Examples of fronting with other parts of speech:
Inversion and fronting are helpful ways to look at revising writing and making sentence openers pop out and add color to the writing!
Source: Jill Walter
Variety in Sentence Structure
http://www.english4dummies.com/grammar/varietystructure.html
12 Different Sentence Openers
http://www.candy4wayphonics.com/vary_sentences_12_ways.htm
Vary Your Sentence Patterns
Source: Jill Walter