Day 106: Combine two sentences by using an introductory phrase or clause.

Let’s say you have two short sentences or one average-length sentence with a short sentence that provides additional information. To prevent your document from sounding too choppy or repetitive, you can combine the two sentences into one. One way to do this is to create an introductory clause or phrase from the additional information. Consider these sentences.

“Our grant writing consultant expressed his belief that the proposal will be funded.”

“He made this statement to the district superintendent.”

These two sentences are nearly the same: the person + speak + statement. This makes the two sentences sound repetitive. Sentence two provides some extra information about the main concept in sentence one. Using this tip, we can create an introductory phrase from sentence two. This gives us the following revision.

广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元

“While speaking to the district superintendent, our grant writing consultant expressed his belief that the proposal will be funded.”

With the extra information in an introductory phrase and not in the main sentence, the main idea of the sentence is clear. This is also a good way to vary sentence length, resulting in more engaging writing, without making your sentences difficult to understand.

Day 107: Use single quotes inside double quotes.

If you are quoting someone or some other text, you know to place double quotation marks ( “ ” ) around the words you are quoting. But what if the words you are quoting include a quote? For example, what do you do if you are quoting these words?

Original text: The author supports the president’s statement that “all economic problems resolve themselves in a free and competitive market.” [Outside quotation marks removed.]

This text you want to quote already contains a quote, so here’s what you do. Place the double quotation marks around the entire text, and then convert the original double quotation marks to single quotation marks. Your text will look like this:

Your version: “The author supports the president’s statement that ‘all economic problems resolve themselves in a free and competitive market.’ ”

The single quotation marks let the reader know that you are quoting a quote. Also, notice the extra space between the single and double quotation mark at the end.