Avoid THERE IS/THERE ARE

Lose There is or There are in the beginning of a sentence.

Why?

If you start your sentences with There is or There are, you will damage your text clarity severely.

The reason is that "you turn the natural order of English language upside down" (Douglas, 2015, p. 41).

The typical structure of an English sentence is SUBJECT + VERB + OBJECT.

Therefore, your readers will want to see a logical subject of the sentence early on. However, your readers will only get an adverb there that serves purely grammatical function and refers to nothing logically.

To make the matter worse, the verb BE that follows does not portray any real action - this verb only signifies the existence of something.

As a result, your readers will need more time to process the sentence and to figure out the meaning (Ferreira, 2003).

Finaly, if you lose There is or There are, your sentences will just be shorter.

Take a look at the examples below.

But people use THERE IS or THERE ARE!

They do. However, you will only see this construction in oral speech or in fiction reproducing oral speech. Oral speech is generally abundant in inefficiencies and redundancies since a listener needs them to compensate for fast speech, unusual accents and distraction.

A writer can also use There is or There are in song lyrics to match the length of rhythmic lines to music.

Where does it come from?

In the 11th century, the French-speaking Normans invaded England and conquered the country. Up to now, you can see numerous linguistic relics of that conquest. One of the relics is There is/There are that was a word-for-word translation of the French il y a. In French, this phrase represented a shift in time or setting. Still, the Norman conquest is over, and it is time you avoided this ineffecient linguistic construction in your writing.

References

Avoid Common Pitfalls. (n.d.). Purdue Writing Lab. https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/conciseness/avoid_common_pitfalls.html

Douglas, Y. (2015). The Reader's Brain: How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Ferreira, F. (2003). The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47(2), 164-203.

What are Expletive Constructions and Why Should I Avoid Them? (n.d.) Re:word. https://reword.ca/what-are-expletive-constructions-and-why-should-i-avoid-them/#