DEMO - Complex sentences

From the SENTENCES section.
Let us now look at how complex sentences can help us to kill two birds with one stone.

The two ill-fated birds are:

bird1-a.gif weak text cohesion bird3-a.gif too many sentences starting with the same word

First read this story:

I was eleven years old and nervous. It was my first day at grammar school. During the lunch break I joined the queue in the canteen. Most of the boys in the queue were much older. One of them pushed me out. I tried to get back in the queue. A teacher saw me. He thought I was pushing in instead of going to the back of the queue. He didn't ask me. He just told me to see him at the office two hours later. He gave me a beating. I was devastated. I should have told my parents. I didn't though. I was too ashamed.

Notice that the sentences are too similar in length, and that the last four all start with "I". There are also several that start with "He". Furthermore, the writer could have livened up the text with some expressions that show his attitude to events in the story. Think about how you would have tried to improve this text, then compare your version with ours. Do you agree that the second version ("FASIT") is an improvement? What changes have been made to bring about this improvement? Look for instance at the length and number of sentences. What is the effect of keeping the short sentence "I was devastated"?

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