In this article we will introduce a new approach (and several implementations) to the task of sentence classification, where pre-defined classes are assigned to sentences. This approach concentrates on structural information that is present in the sentences. This information is extracted using machine learning techniques and the patterns found are used to classify the sentences. The approach fits in between the existing machine learning and hand-crafting of regular expressions approaches, and it combines the best of both. The sequential information present in the sentences is used directly, classifiers can be generated automatically and the output and intermediate representations can be investigated and manually optimised if needed.