Trouble starting a sentence? Here’s a 3-word formula

Writing for the Guardian, a linguist identifies the paper’s top 20 sentence starters.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

Apparently, Charles Dickens was onto something when he started “A Tale of Two Cities” that way.

The Guardian looks at sentence starters, and it finds that the opening of sentences really matters. After checking out the Guardian’s archives, author Chris Tribble identifies the top 20 “three-word sentence beginnings that, when taken with the words which follow them, constitute a sort of journalist’s toolkit.”

This kit will work for corporate writers as well, although some may debate whether frequency of use indicates successful wordplay or a lapse into trite thought patterns.

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