Here for Peggy Carter.

it doesn’t have to be a “punch line” as in the end of a joke. It could be the part that punches you in the gut. The most exciting, juicy, shocking info goes at the end of the sentence. Two different examples that show the difference it makes:

doing it wrong:

She saw her brother’s dead body when she caught the smell of something rotting, thought it was coming from the fridge, and followed it into the kitchen.

doing it right:

Catching the smell of something rotten wafting from the kitchen—probably from the fridge, she thought—she followed the smell into the kitchen, and saw her brother’s dead body.

Periods are where you stop to process the sentence. Put the dead body at the start of the sentence and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, you’ve piled a whole kitchen and a weird fridge smell on top of it, and THEN you have to process the body, and it’s buried so much it barely has an impact. Put the dead body at the end, and it’s like an emotional exclamation point. Everything’s normal and then BAM, her brother’s dead.

This rule doesn’t just apply to sentences: structuring lists or paragraphs like this, by putting the important info at the end, increases their punch too. It’s why in tropes like Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking or Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick, the odd item out comes at the end of the list.

Subverting this rule can also be used to manipulate reader’s emotional reactions or tell them how shocking they SHOULD find a piece of information in the context of a story. For example, a more conventional sentence that follows this rule:

She opened the pantry door, looking for a jar of grape jelly, but the view of the shelves was blocked by a ghost.

Oh! There’s a ghost! That’s shocking! Probably the character in our sentence doesn’t even care about the jelly anymore because the spirit of a dead person has suddenly appeared inside her pantry, and that’s obviously a much higher priority. But, subvert the rule:

She opened the pantry door, found a ghost blocking her view of the shelves, and couldn’t see past it to where the grape jelly was supposed to be.

What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?

Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.

What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?

My father sent me a guardian angel from Heaven to guide and comfort me in his absence: "Okay, not something that happens every day, but that is what guardian angels are supposed to do and Dad did indicate something like this would happen."

Adorable stone resin animal figurines, manufactured by Enesco, looks like they’re made from fruits and vegetables. See more here. Which one is your favorite?