Do You Truly Know How to Make Your Writing Flow?

In a previous post on Clarity in Writing, I wrote about making our subjects represent our characters and verbs — critical actions they perform. We saw how sentences revised with these two principles became clearer and easier to understand. This made us sensitive to the notion of local clarity. But local clarity isn’t enough. There is a larger context in which our writing is embedded and it poses its own demands. Elements of this larger context are: our intentions or goals, our point of view, our audience, the context of writing.

This means we need to think beyond local clarity and shape the flow of sentences to satisfy these demands. Let’s see how to do that based on Chapter 3 of Joseph M. Williams’s Style: Toward Clarity and Grace.

1. Local Clarity vs Flow

Compare these two sentences from the book.

a. A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble.

b. The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates a black hole.

We know that active is better than passive and so from this isolated example, b. is better than a. This is the point of view of local clarity.

Let’s now see its “environment”, the sentence before and the one after:

(1) Some astonishing questions about the nature of the universe have been raised by scientists exploring the nature of black holes in space. (2) [the sentence above a./b.] (3) So much matter compressed into so little volume changes the fabric of space around it in profoundly puzzling ways.

Do you agree that a. (the passive version) makes the flow of the sentences more coherent? Why is that?

Let’s see the book’s explanation:

“The reasons are not far to seek: The last part of sentence (1) introduces one of the important characters in the story: black holes in space. If we write sentence (2) in the active voice, we cannot mention black holes again until its end, as the object of an active verb: The collapse of a dead star . . . creates a black hole. However, if we shift that object to the beginning, where it will echo the last few words of sentence, we will improve the flow. We can do that by making black hole the subject of a passive verb: A black hole is created…. By doing that, we also move to the end of sentence (2) the concept that will open sentence (3), and thereby create a tight conceptual link between those two sentences: A black hole is created by the collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble. So much matter compressed into so little volume changes the fabric of space . . . .”

This means that with every sentence we write, we need to find a balance between local clarity in a sentence and the overall flow of sentences, their organisation. We have learned the rules that can help us create local clarity. So, now we turn to

“the principles of cohesion that fuse separate sentences into a whole discourse”.

2. The Rules of Cohesion

Two complementary principles of cohesion are:

1. Put at the beginning of a sentence those ideas that you have already mentioned, referred to, or implied, or concepts that you can reasonably assume your reader is already familiar with, and will readily recognize.
2. Put at the end of your sentence the newest, the most surprising, the most significant information: information that you want to stress-perhaps the information that you will expand on in your next sentence.

3. The Topic

These rules mean that we need to create a smooth and coherent flow of ideas across our sentences. That is all very well. But how do we know which ideas to focus on? Consider this example: As for abortion, it is not clear how the Supreme Court will rule. Which idea should we focus on abortion or it or perhaps Supreme Court? The answer is that we should focus on the topic of the sentence, its psychological subject, what those sentences are “about”.

In most English sentences, psychological subjects are also grammatical subjects: Private higher education is seriously concerned about population trends through the end of the century. But that is not always the case. In our example above (As for abortion, it is not clear how the Supreme Court will rule.), the subject is it and the topic is abortion.

Topics control how readers perceive sentences, not individually but as a whole. Your readers are hardwired to first look for the “who” and the “what” in your text. So, your biggest concern as a writer is to arrange the topics in a way that helps the readers find them and get a feeling of coherent topic string.

4. Arranging Topics for the Best Flow

Let’s see how we can revise a text from the book and improve it’s flow / topic string:

We think it useful to provide some relatively detailed illustration of the varied ways “corporate curricular personalities” organize themselves in programs. We choose to feature as a central device in our presentation what are called “introductory,” “survey,” or “foundational” courses. It is important, however, to recognize the diversity of what occurs in programs after the different initial survey courses. But what is also suggested is that if one talks about a program simply in terms of the intellectual strategies or techniques engaged in, when these are understood in a general way, it becomes difficult to distinguish many programs from others.

The text is about programs (italicized in the paragraph). But we seem to loose it. It is buried under heavy metadiscourse (therefore, it is important, it is useful) as well as announcing of intentions and general throat-clearing (we choose to feature, it is also suggested).

The revised paragraph reads:

Our programs create varied “corporate” curricular personalities, particularly through their “introductory,” “survey,” or “foundational” courses. After these initial courses, they continue to offer diverse curricula.

So, the main flow takeaway is this:

Among groups of related sentences, keep their topics consistent, if you can. They don’t have to be identical, but they should constitute a string that your readers will take to be focused.

A quick method to determine how well you have managed your topics in a passage: Run a line under the first five or six words of every sentence. Read the phrases you underlined straight through. If any of them seems clearly outside the general set of topics, check whether it refers to ideas mentioned toward the end of the previous sentence. If not, consider revising.

5. Managing Subjects and Topics

Let’s turn now to 3 practical ways to revise sentences for an improved flow.

1. Passives again

Original: Astronomers, physicists, and a host of other researchers entirely familiar with the problems raised by quasars have confirmed these observations.

Revised in order to replace a long subject full of new information with a short one that locates the reader in the context of something more familiar: These observations have been confirmed by astronomers, physicists, and a host of other researchers entirely familiar with the problems raised by quasars.

2. Subject-complement switching

Original: The source of the American attitude toward rural dialects is more interesting [than something already mentioned].

Revised: More interesting [than something already mentioned] is the source of the American attitude toward rural dialects.

3. Subject-Clause Transformations

Original: An attorney who uncovers after the close of a discovery proceeding documents that might be even peripherally relevant to a matter involved in the discovery proceeding must notify both the court and the opposing attorney immediately.

Revised: [If a discovery proceeding closes and an attorney then uncovers documents that might be even peripherally relevant to the matter of the proceeding,] he must notify both the court and the opposing attorney immediately.

6. The Special Case of Designing a Topic

Let’s turn to the book for this complex issue:

“A writer can create quite subtle effects by finding verbs that will let him shift into the subject/topic position those characters that will best serve his purposes.

When Tom and I bumped, my glass dropped, and the juice spilled.

vs

When I bumped into Tom I dropped my glass and spilled the juice.

Neither sentence is more or less “true” to the facts. But while both have an agent-action style, the second assigns responsibility to an agent in a way different from the first.

Compare the first few sentences of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Rewritten from another topical view, it reads:

Four score and seven years ago, this continent witnessed the birth of a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition of our fathers that all men are created equal. Now, this great Civil War that engages us is testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

Lincoln assigned responsibility to his audience. By consistently topicalizing we to make himself and his audience the agents of the crucial actions, Lincoln made them one with the founding fathers and with the men who fought and died at Gettysburg. By so doing, he tacitly invited his listeners to join their dead forefathers and their dead countrymen in making the great sacrifices the living had still to make to preserve the Union.

My revision shifts agency away from people and assigns it to abstractions and places: the continent witnesses, a great civil war tests, the war creates, the ground will not let, it has taken. I have metaphorically invested agency and responsibility not in people but in abstractions. Had Lincoln presented my version, he would have relieved his audience of their responsibility to act, and would thereby have deprived us of one of the great documents in our history.”

Summing Up

The two capital secrets in the art of prose composition are these: first the philosophy of transition and connection; or the art by which one step in an evolution of thought is made to arise out of another: all fluent and effective composition depends on the connections; secondly, the way in which sentences are made to modify each other; for the most powerful effects in written eloquence arise out of this reverberation, as it were, from each other in a rapid succession of sentences.

Thomas De Quincy