There’s a sentence structure I see in many developing writers’ work, and when I point it out, they’re always surprised — not because they didn’t know they were doing it, but because they thought they were doing something good.
The structure looks like this:
Gripping the railing, she made her way down the stairs.
Scanning the crowd for familiar faces, he pushed through the door.
Pulling her jacket tighter against the wind, she turned onto Main Street.
It’s the participial phrase opening — a sentence that starts with an -ing verb and a chunk of description before the reader gets to the main clause. Writers do it constantly. And almost every time, I tell them the same thing: stop doing this. At least for now.
As one of my first writing teachers, Ellen Cooney, told me way back in 1998: “Don’t start a sentence with a gerund adverbial phrase.” Nevermind that I didn’t even know what that was!
She didn’t explain why. Just said, “Don’t do this.”
Now I understand. It’s not because it’s always wrong. But because for developing writers, it’s solving a problem that doesn’t exist—while creating three problems that do.
(Another interesting piece of advice she offered me: “Don’t use semi-colons until you understand the difference between a dependent and an independent clause.” I didn’t!)
The Problem That Doesn’t Exist
Here’s why writers do the verb phrase opener (I think). At some point, they notice that a lot of their sentences start the same way: subject, then verb. She walked. He said. She noticed. He turned. And they think: this is boring. This is repetitive. I need to vary my sentence structure.
So they reach for this -ing phrase opening. The cool thing about these is you can put them anywhere in the sentence. Boom! Something to start a different kind of sentence with.
Fixed? Not so much.
It feels more sophisticated. It front-loads some action or description before the main clause. It looks like what they’ve seen in published books.
But here’s the thing: readers don’t notice repetitive sentence openings the way writers do. When you’re drafting, you’re hyper-aware of your patterns because you just wrote the last sentence five seconds ago. Of course “She walked” followed by “She turned” feels repetitive to you.
Your reader isn’t experiencing it that way. They’re moving through your story, watching the scene unfold, tracking the character’s actions. As long as each sentence is doing clear, specific work — showing them something new — they don’t care that it starts with “she.” They don’t notice.
I promise.
Subject-verb sentence openings are invisible to readers the way the word “said” is invisible in dialogue. It’s functional. It’s clear. It disappears. The content of the sentence is what the reader sees, not the structure.
They see your characters, ideally. Not your words on the page.
So the problem you’re trying to fix — repetitive openings — isn’t a problem your reader is having. It’s a problem you’re having while writing. And the fix you’re reaching for creates real issues that your reader will notice.
Problem One: The Reader Doesn’t Know Who’s Acting
The most immediate issue with the participial opening is that it delays the subject. The reader encounters an action before they know who’s performing it.
Scanning the crowd for familiar faces, he pushed through the door.
The reader processes “scanning the crowd for familiar faces” and has to hold that action in suspension — who’s scanning? — until they reach “he.” Then they have to retroactively attach the scanning to this person.
In a simple sentence, this takes a fraction of a second and feels minor. But stack a few of these in a row, or put one at the start of a new scene where the reader doesn’t know who “he” is yet, and the effect adds up. The reader is doing small acts of re-assembly on every sentence. Each one costs a little bit of Reader Capital.
Compare:
He pushed through the door, scanning the crowd for familiar faces.
Now the reader knows who they’re watching before the action begins. The scanning still happens — same content, same image — but the reader processes it forward rather than backward. That’s cleaner. That’s meaning, sense, and clarity.
Or what about this:
He pushed through the door, then scanned the crowd for familiar faces.
Remember what we said about “beats”? Simultaneity?
Problem Two: It Forces Two Things to Happen at Once
A participial phrase at the start of a sentence creates simultaneity — the -ing action and the main verb are presented as happening at the same time.
Gripping the railing, she made her way down the stairs.
The sentence says she’s gripping and descending simultaneously. That one’s plausible. But often the simultaneity doesn’t hold up:
Pulling her phone from her pocket, she answered the call and raised it to her ear.
That’s three things happening at once, and the physics don’t work. She can’t pull the phone out, answer it, and raise it to her ear all in the same moment. These are sequential actions — one follows another — but the sentence structure compresses them into a single beat.
When you write actions in sequence — one sentence, one action, then the next — the reader sees a chronology moving forward. They watch the scene unfold like a film. When you stack actions into simultaneous -ing phrases, the reader has to process everything at once, and the scene gets blurry.
She pulled her phone from her pocket. She answered and raised it to her ear.
That’s two beats. Two clear images. The reader sees each one.
Problem Three: It Buries Your Strong Verb
This connects to something I’ve written about in the hierarchy of your sentences. When you put a vivid verb in a participial phrase, you’re placing it in a grammatically subordinate position. It’s a modifier — decoration, not structure. The main verb in the main clause is the one carrying the sentence, and it’s often weaker than the verb you buried in the opening.
Slamming the door behind her, she walked into the kitchen.
Slammed is the strong verb — it’s physical, it’s emotional, it implies force. Walked is the main verb, and it’s generic. The sentence has its hierarchy backward. The best word is in the servant’s quarters.
She slammed the door behind her, then walked into the kitchen.
Now slammed gets to be the main verb of its own sentence. It lands harder. And walked carries the next beat without having to compete.
The Permission You Need
I know what you’re thinking: if I stop doing this, all my sentences will start with a name or a pronoun. Won’t that be monotonous?
It won’t. Or rather — it won’t be monotonous to your reader, even if it feels that way to you while writing. Your reader is watching the movie, not counting how many sentences start with “she.”
And here’s the thing: once you stop reaching for the participial phrase opening as a default, you’ll start finding other, better ways to vary your sentences. You’ll vary sentence length instead of sentence structure. You’ll open with a short piece of setting. You’ll use dialogue. You’ll find that a well-placed short sentence after a long one creates more rhythmic variety than any number of -ing phrases.
But for now, don’t worry about variety. Worry about clarity. Start with the subject. Follow it with the verb. Let the reader know who’s acting and what they’re doing, in that order. Build the habit of clean, forward-moving sentences where the reader never has to double back.
You can always add sophistication later. Right now, the goal is control.
If you want a deeper, structured walk-through of this skill, my Show Don’t Tell course is here.
