The cockroach as antagonist is getting characterization. … As readers we’re invited into the joke. After all, what we’re talking about here is a fact-based science article dancing on the edge of epic. The clauses tend to begin with subjects who are agents and actors in this drama: the insect, researchers, cockroaches, manufacturers. The sentences tend to be paratactic. Perhaps more important, the sentences are varied and build in that first paragraph to a climax. Simple sentence. Simple sentence. Simple sentence with a prepositional phrase (“In the centuries long war”). Complex sentence. Compound sentence, but this one using a colon to connect two simple sentences, a device that accelerates emphasis on the final clause: “Cockroaches, like us, simply couldn’t resist their sweet tooth.”

Tilar J Mazzeo, How to Write a Bestseller, loc. 515