Sentence Starters - How to Use with Examples

Have you been finding it difficult to find good sentence starters? Do you think you have ideas but have some starting trouble? There is nothing to worry about if you do. All that you need to do is learn how to do it and apply them when penning down or voicing out your thoughts and ideas. This article will introduce you to what sentence starters are, how to use them effectively to form well-structured and coherent sentences in a paragraph along with examples for you to analyse and comprehend how it works.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Sentence Starter?
• Where and How to Use a Sentence Starter? – Points to Remember
• Examples of Sentence Starters
  • List of Commonly Used Sentence Starters
• Frequently Asked Questions on Sentence Starters

What Is a Sentence Starter?

Words and phrases that start off a sentence or introduce a thought can be referred to as sentence starters. Sentence starters make your writing more connected and meaningful. When you are writing about a topic, it is not necessary that you mention your ideas that support it; there definitely will be points that you think are mention-worthy but contradictory. We use sentence starters to make the transition and flow from one point to another smooth. This is not just the case with sentences; the same technique can also be used to connect paragraphs as well.

Where and How to Use a Sentence Starter? – Points to Remember

When you sit down to write a speech, an essay or a report on a particular topic, you normally start by jotting down the points from the top of your head. To add to what you know, you might also research a little. It is only then that you put everything together. When you do this, it is very important that you compare and contrast your thoughts as well as all the points that you have collected as part of your research and put them together in a way that all of it makes complete sense. This is where sentence starters play a role.

Sentence starters prepare your target audience for what’s coming next. It lets you bridge the gap between a thought, its justification, its contradiction, its examples, affirming evidence and so on. Now, knowing a number of sentence starters alone will not help. You have to learn how and where to use them in order to make your writing or speech meaningful.

To help you make proper and effective use of sentence starters, here is a list of the kind of situations where the usage of a sentence starter will definitely prove beneficial.

• The first instance would be when you are introducing a new thought or idea; for example, the very first sentence that is used to begin a paragraph, an essay, a report or a story.
• Be it fiction or nonfiction, whatever you are writing about has to have an interesting beginning. A catchy thought and the way you use your words creatively is what will hook your readers.
• When backing a thought with some data or when providing information that support/justify your finding, you will need a sentence starter to make a connection to whatever you have spoken about previously.
• When you have two contrasting ideas placed next to each other, you will have to use a sentence starter.
• A sentence starter can also help you emphasise on whichever idea you think is important.
• A sentence starter is further used to transition from one paragraph to another.
• Finally, to conclude a writeup, you can use a sentence starter so that your audience knows that it is the end of your piece.
• As long as the punctuation of a sentence with a sentence starter is concerned, the only thing you will have to keep in mind is that a comma is usually placed after the sentence starter in case the sentence starter is a preposition, an adverb or a phrase.

Examples of Sentence Starters

Going through some examples of sentence starters can give you a deeper understanding of what they are and where all you can use them, so go through the following section and make use of the examples provided in your writing as and when required.

List of Commonly Used Sentence Starters

Take a look at the following examples of sentence starters that can be used in the various situations mentioned.