Putting Ideas Together in Sentences

Just as with paragraphs, the reader’s reception of your ideas depends upon logically organized sentences. Good sentences depend upon coherence, clarity, and quality of flow. Achieving these goals in your writing is possible, but it takes a keen awareness of how your ideas relate to each other at the sentence level. 

Sentences are made up of ideas. At its most basic level, a sentence can have just one idea, for example:

We cannot grant your request.  

With such a sentence, the reader probably expects to know why the request cannot be granted. This is a related idea that is best placed in the same sentence.

We cannot grant your request because we have no funds left in this year's budget for this kind of expenditure.

If you wrote two sentences …

We cannot grant your request. We have no funds left in this year's budget for this kind of expenditure.

… you would be leaving out the relationship between the two ideas and forcing readers to work it out for themselves. A good sentence shows the relationship between the parts clearly and with the correct joining words.