Writing Skeletons
“In order to get into the hang of academic writing it is sometimes helpful to examine closely the way in which other writers structure their work.
Swales and Feak offer the use of skeleton sentences to achieve this. This where all of the content is stripped out of a paragraph in order to reveal the syntactic moves. They suggest that those wishing to improve their writing should experiment with putting their own content into these skeletons. This is the equivalent of walking in someone else’s footprints.”
Examples and more: writing skeletons