Back in the late 90s, in the process of reading for my MA dissertation, I put together a collection of hundreds of sentence stems that I felt could help me with my academic writing later on. And they did. Immensely. After the course was over, I stacked my sentences away, but kept wondering if I could ever put them to good use and perhaps help other DELTA / Trinity / MA / PhD students who know exactly what they want to say, but might have trouble finding the best way to say it.
So here are 70 sentences extracted and adapted from the original compilation, which ran for almost 10 pages. This list is organized around keywords (rather than functions / discourse categories) so I can explore each word’s ecosystem better, highlight common collocations and so on.