Until my junior year in high school, I thought my writing was pretty hot stuff. Teachers had always commended me for my sound ideas, clear sentences and expressive descriptions.

Then I met Mr. Wittern.

My 11th-grade English teacher, Herman Wittern, was as eloquent and reflective as the 19th-century American poets he loved. In fact, I always thought he had the perfect last name to be teaching authors like John Greenleaf Whittier and Walt Whitman.

But Mr. Wittern's last name also contained the letters of the word "writer," and, when it came to teaching writing, he was as tenacious as a terrier. He voluntarily gave up his lunch hours to offer his students one-on-one critiques of their essays.

During our first lunchtime conference, he came right to the point. "Your ideas are interesting," he said, "but your sentence structure isn't. Each sentence starts the same way — with the subject."

I was devastated.

But as the hot crimson of humiliation climbed from my neck to my face, he suggested four ways to vary the structure of my sentences with:

PARTICIPIAL PHRASES: Use a participle (a verb turned into an adjective) to modify the subject of the sentence. Consider, for instance, the sing-song statement "The heroine wears a red cape and rescues people in danger." Use the participle form of "wears" to produce the more heroic "Wearing a red cape, the heroine rescues people in danger."

PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES: Use a prepositional phrase to invigorate a sentence. The sentence "Only five seconds were left and the Bruins scored" is boring. But write, "With only five seconds left, the Bruins scored," and your puck hits the back of the net.

APPOSITIVE PHRASES: An appositive is a noun or noun phrase that renames a nearby noun, as in, "Taylor Swift, media darling." Handy tags of information, appositives can be inserted at the beginning of a sentence to create variety — as I just did at the beginning of this sentence.

SUBORDINATE CLAUSES: Use a subordinate clause (a group of words beginning with conjunctions, such as "after," "because" or "while") to clarify the relationship between two parts of a sentence. Thus, the pedestrian statement "Mr. Wittern carefully explained the flaws in my sentence structure, and I became a better writer" becomes smoother and more explicit: "Because Mr. Wittern carefully explained the flaws in my sentence structure, I became a better writer."

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Connecticut, invites your language sightings. His book, "Mark My Words," is available for $9.99 on Amazon.com. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via email to [email protected] or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.

Photo credit: Aaron Burden at Unsplash