on Fiction University:

A varied sentence structure can help keep your writing from sounding stale and flat.

After eight years of diagnosing pages here, and a few decades of critique experience, I’m quite familiar with issues writers face—from those just starting to write, to those on the brink of selling their novels, and even those with multiple published novels. Some aspects of writing are difficult for almost everyone, and each stage of the author’s journey has its own set of challenges.

One of those challenges is writing sentences that don’t all sound the same.

Getting into a stale “writing rhythm” can lead us down the path of flat sentences with the same basic structure. We’re focused more on getting the information down than crafting compelling prose, so the writing ends up sounding list-like or monotonous. For example: