Sentence startersAt the tender age of 10-ish, when I first learned how to write an essay, my teacher instructed me to start each new paragraph with some kind of starter like first, second, furthermore, or finally. Since then, I have refined my sentence starters with a dash of sneakiness to provide a smooth transition and tie together ideas, without breaking the reader’s flow with clunky lead-in words. (At least, that’s the hope.) Think of a sentence starter as a warmup before exercising. If you jump from idea to idea with no starters at all, your reader may feel jerked around and pull a proverbial muscle. But you also can’t overuse this writing tool (like starting every other sentence with “However”). Another fantastic tightrope for us writers to walk, hey? To illustrate, let’s look at a paragraph from this article I wrote last month:
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