Sentence Skills for Technical Writers

Abstract

In most textbooks on technical writing, understandability of sentences is misleadingly equated with grammatical primitiveness. In actual technical writing, however, writers regularly conform to six basic rules dealing with the uses of base clauses and free modifiers, as well as punctuation. There are ten types of free modifiers, which can be used singly or in parallel or nonparallel sequences. All types are used either to add details to a key idea expressed in a base clause or to make transitions between one sentence or paragraph and another.