101 Great Sentence Starters for Writing

If you’re teaching how to use transition words well in writing, these writing sentence starters are sure to come in handy.

Sentence starters for writing are short phrases or words that jump-start a piece of writing and/or transition a piece of writing from one point to the next in a meaningful and purposeful way so that the reader has ease following along.

Though they may be used with any type of writing, they are more commonly used with nonfiction texts such as essays which include facts.

Without the use of these helpful starter ideas, the writing piece would be incoherent and disorganized making it hard for readers to follow.

The issue is figuring out which writing sentence starters to use in your paper.

Here we have compiled a collection of useful sentence starters for writing. The examples are categorized by introduction, body, and conclusion. 

When To Use Writing Sentence Starters

Though very beneficial, it is not required to use a sentence starter with every sentence.

Writing sentence starters are best used when the writer wants to…

  • Highlight a particular point or idea. When a fact or concept is very important, the writer may use a word or phrase to give emphasis to it.
  • Grab the reader’s attention. Though this is normally done at the beginning of the writing in order to hook the reader, a writer may want to focus the reader’s attention on a particular fact or idea. Sentence starters can help with this.
  • Introduce or conclude. Of course, there are introductory and conclusion-type sentence starters that signal openings and closings. These set the tone for the piece of writing and serve to summarize the main points, respectively.
  • Present a new concept or idea. Sentence starters are useful for seamlessly presenting new information and points of view.
  • Link ideas. A piece of writing may present several ideas and/or perspectives. When used well, sentence starters connect these topics in a way to help readers understand the main idea.

Writing Sentence Starters

Following you will find various examples of sentence starters that you can use for various types of writing such as essays. 

Introduction Writing Sentence Starters

  • I firmly believe…
  • Despite the fact that it has been shown that…
  • It is my strong opinion…
  • Many people would agree…
  • It is hard to dispute that…
  • My stance is that…
  • In general, (state the main idea of the topic)…

Body Writing Sentence Starters

  • First…
  • The first thing to remember…
  • In the first place…
  • To begin with…
  • Second…
  • Third…
  • Not only…but also…
  • In contrast…
  • For example…
  • By the same token…
  • Together with…
  • On the other hand…
  • My next point is…
  • Comparatively…
  • As a matter of fact…
  • Nonetheless…
  • In addition…
  • Equally important…
  • Despite…
  • Furthermore,
  • Additionally, 
  • Similar to this idea is…
  • Whereas…
  • Identically…
  • Besides…
  • In the same way that…
  • Likewise…
  • Not to mention that…
  • Albeit…
  • To illustrate…
  • We can see this in…
  • Unlike…
  • Moreover,
  • As well as…
  • Conversely…
  • Granted that…
  • As long as…
  • Regardless…
  • For the purpose of…
  • In the hope that…
  • Though…
  • In general,…
  • It is important to realize…
  • Whenever…
  • Provided that…
  • However…
  • Due to…
  • In other words…
  • Otherwise…
  • For one thing…
  • In this case…
  • On the contrary…
  • To put it another way…
  • Instead…
  • It must be remembered that…
  • To be sure that…
  • Namely…
  • In spite of…
  • At the same time…
  • Such as…
  • In reality…
  • Especially…
  • Rather…
  • Particularly…
  • As much as…
  • In fact…
  • Even though…
  • To demonstrate…
  • Although…
  • To explain…
  • Above all…
  • Under those circumstances…
  • After all…
  • In effect…
  • Notwithstanding…
  • Therefore…
  • Nevertheless…
  • In due time…

Conclusion Sentence Starters for Writing

  • In summary,…
  • To sum up,…
  • In conclusion…
  • Overall…
  • In essence…
  • Undoubtedly…
  • In short…
  • On the whole…
  • As has been noted…
  • Generally speaking…
  • All in all…
  • Ultimately…
  • As shown…
  • Finally…
  • For the reasons above…
  • As you can see…

Final Thoughts On Writing Sentence Starters

Ensure writing pieces or essays flow nicely by using these helpful writing sentence starters.

The message will have more clarity and appear more polished.

Download a PDF of these sentence starters for writing.

Related: sentence starters for narrative writing