Five basic modes of alternative splicing are generally recognized.
* Exon skipping or cassette exon: in this case, an exon may be spliced out of the primary transcript or retained. This is the most common mode in mammalian pre-mRNAs.
* Mutually exclusive exons: One of two exons is retained in mRNAs after splicing, but not both.
* Alternative donor site: An alternative 5 splice junction (donor site) is used, changing the 3 boundary of the upstream exon.
* Alternative acceptor site: An alternative 3 splice junction (acceptor site) is used, changing the 5 boundary of the downstream exon.
* Intron retention: A sequence may be spliced out as an intron or simply retained. This is distinguished from exon skipping because the retained sequence is not flanked by introns. If the retained intron is in the coding region, the intron must encode amino acids in frame with the neighboring exons, or a stop codon or a shift in the reading frame will cause the protein to be non-functional. This is the rarest mode in mammals but the most common in plants.
In addition to these primary modes of alternative splicing, there are two other main mechanisms by which different mRNAs may be generated from the same gene; multiple promoters and multiple polyadenylation sites. Use of multiple promoters is properly described as a transcriptional regulation mechanism rather than alternative splicing; by starting transcription at different points, transcripts with different 5-most exons can be generated. At the other end, multiple polyadenylation sites provide different 3 end points for the transcript. Both of these mechanisms are found in combination with alternative splicing and provide additional variety in mRNAs derived from a gene. 
<br>These modes describe basic splicing mechanisms, but may be inadequate to describe complex splicing events. For instance, the figure to the right shows 3 spliceforms from the mouse hyaluronidase 3 gene. Comparing the exonic structure shown in the first line (green) with the one in the second line (yellow) shows intron retention, whereas the comparison between the second and the third spliceform (yellow vs. blue) exhibits exon skipping. A model nomenclature to uniquely designate all possible splicing patterns has recently been proposed.