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How to Improve the Flow of Your Writing

Four Areas to Add Connections and Transitions

Learn how the connections you create can pull readers in and make your work easier to read and enjoy.

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Like a good meal blends effortlessly from appetizer through dessert, you want your writing to flow seamlessly from chapter to chapter, section to section, and paragraph to paragraph. It’s part art and part strategy, with the goal, of course, to help your readers follow your ideas through to the end of a piece of writing.

Of course, there’s more to it than just structure and writing transitions. You still need a good story arc, coherent thoughts, and some takeaway that gives readers a reason to read your work in the first place. But good writing flow lends continuity and builds reader trust. So what elements can help create this flow?

Elements of Flow

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Let’s assume we are talking about writing a nonfiction book. To create flow, you need to provide transitions at all levels of your writing, including:

1. The work as a whole
2. Chapter to chapter
3. Section to section
4. Paragraph to paragraph

At the sentence level, flow is a mostly matter of syntax, word choice, and grammar. Instead of focusing on individual words and phrases that create connections, let’s look at flow and transitions on a macro level, starting with the work as a whole.

The Work as a Whole

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You have several opportunities for creating a thread of continuity through the entire work. Elements that create your macro flow include:

• Book introductions
• Part introductions
• Book conclusions
• Titles
• Cross references

Book Introductions

We’ll start with introductions. Intros remind readers where they are in a piece of writing and prepare them for what’s next.

Here’s an example from Noel Rappin’s Modern CSS with Tailwind:

In this book, you’re going to look at how to design web pages using Tailwind CSS version 3.0 and up. You’ll start with the typography of individual elements, and then you’ll get to “the box” — the rectangle of space each element takes up — and how to manipulate it. Once you have your elements in boxes, you’ll take a look at page layout with flexbox or grids.

After that, you’ll look at turning individual pages into full sites. You’ll also look at common site-wide page layouts, managing a design on different screen sizes, and handling a site-wide amount of styles and CSS.

Pretty clear, right? We know exactly where we’re going. There’s no mystery here. As a reader, you don’t have to wonder what you’re getting into or if it’s worth your time. If we want to create web pages with Tailwind CSS, we are absolutely in the right place. If your work contains parts, you can add similar part intros to let readers know what to expect in each part. Since introductions and conclusions are related, we’ll talk about conclusions next.

Book Conclusions

Where an introduction looks at what’s ahead, the book conclusion looks back and emphasizes any major points, summarizes the information, and helps lead readers to autonomy on the topic. With more technical or “how-to” topics, you should make conclusions practical and encourage readers to branch out and apply what they have learned. Here’s a good book conclusion from Java by Comparison:

What Have You Learned?

The authors both remind readers of the major takeaways from the book and encourage readers to explore on their own. In addition to big picture elements like intros and conclusions, smaller elements like titles and cross references can tie the larger work together.

Titles

Titles are labels for your content and come at all levels in a book. While not technically transitions, titles are a major element in creating flow. You have the book title, subtitle, part titles, chapter titles, headings, table titles, figure titles. Let’s look at the title elements that can help create internal flow.

For all internal labels, a major strategy to establish connections between like elements is parallel construction. To create parallel construction, write words or phrases in the same form. If a chapter title uses the gerund verb form ending in “ing,” then other chapter titles should too. Have a look at chapter titles from Genetic Algorithms in Elixir:

Genetic Algorithms in Elixir

If you browse the table of contents, you’ll notice the author consistently using “ing” verbs in his chapter titles, and that they are all of similar length, like:

• “Writing Your First Genetic Algorithm”
• “Breaking Down Genetic Algorithms”
• “Encoding Problems and Solutions”

You can apply the same rule to section headings, figure labels, and table titles. For section headings, you can further help readers by alternating the form between different levels. If chapter headings using the gerund form, level one headings could use the imperative. So for the genetic algorithms book, level one headings could read:

• Select Parents
• Create Children
• Run Your Solution

By varying the construction at different levels, you give readers an instant signpost about location independent of title formatting.

In addition to parallel construction, another strategy to create flow is to lend titles a sense of progress. “Select,” “Create,” and “Run” in the preceding example give readers a sense of progress. To make it simple, you can use Bloom’s taxonomy, using verbs from each level sequentially:

• Identify Your Population
• Compare Selection Methods
• Solve Convergence Issues
• Devise Selection Strategies
• Customize Mutations
• Design an Evolving Network

With headings linking the work together, there is one more connection element to add at the macro level: cross references.

Cross References

Cross references to other sections of your work help tie all the pieces together. Consider this example from Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies by Tammy Coron:

You’ll learn more about SKS files in Chapter 7, Building Scenes with the Scene Editor, on page 159, but for now, right-click these two files, select Delete, and then Move to Trash.

and this one:

In Configure the View and Load the Scene, on page 175, you learned how to
load a scene file through code. If you recall, loading a scene file takes place
in the viewDidLoad() method of the GameViewController.swift file.

In the first instance, the author lets readers know when they can expect more information on a topic mentioned. In the second, she gives readers a way to refresh something they learned previously. Cross reference act both as a macro flow element, and a way to create a transition at the section and paragraph levels. But before we get all the way down to paragraphs, we need to talk about chapter to chapter transitions.

Chapter to Chapter Transitions

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We want to help readers understand where they’ve been, what they’ve learned, and where they’re going. Think of transitions as signposts. Transitions into and out of chapters are excellent places for recaps and to remind readers that it’s okay to give themselves a little pat on the back for sticking with you, especially if you’re exploring challenging information or working through new skills.

Looking again at Modern CSS with Tailwind: Flexible Styling Without the Fuss, here’s an example of a chapter introduction that forms a transition from one chapter to the next:

In the previous chapter, we looked at ways you can use Tailwind to control the display of a single DOM element. In this chapter, we’ll look at how Tailwind can manage the layout of multiple elements.

With Tailwind, you can lay out the elements on an entire page and manage common features like navigation, sidebars, and footers. You can also use Tailwind to put together complex groupings of elements within a page, such as cards or hero blocks.

Let’s start with some general utilities Tailwind provides to help place elements on a page: the box-to-box relationships.

Okay. Cool. We are on the right track. We haven’t missed some major piece of information about navigation or footers. That’s coming up. We are “flowing” with this book.

Similarly, you want chapter conclusions to provide a look back. In a conclusion you should emphasize major takeaways, acknowledge accomplishments, and lead readers into the next section. Here’s an example from Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies:

In this chapter, you learned how to animate and move a sprite node using the SKAction class, and you dipped a toe in the proverbial water, learning how to use one of the more powerful and lesser-known classes of SpriteKit, SKConstraint.

As a bonus, you got to create a custom Player class and use a few built-in functions to manipulate the direction and speed of the player node. You also got to add some useful and reusable extensions to the SKSpriteNode class.

In the next chapter, you’ll add the gloop drops to your game and build on what you learned about actions. You’ll also discover how to use iterative design as you modify the movement of the player node.

The author reinforces what we’ve learned and tells us where we are going next. Just as you create these signposts at the chapter level, you can make similar connections between sections.

Section to Section Transitions

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A section is any content under the chapter level that is separated by a heading. Transitions between sections in a chapter give a clear picture about how one section relates to the next. Here’s a transition from Apple Game Frameworks and Technologies, from a section called “Build a Monster Generator” to a section called “Animate the Monsters:”

Build and run the project. Notice that every five seconds, the monster generator spawns a new skeleton monster with a health of 3. After 10 monsters, the generator stops.

You’re making great progress, but the monster generators could use a little
animation to help bring them to life and set them apart from the regular (soon
to be roaming) monsters.

So what does Tammy accomplish with this transition? She tells readers how the next section builds on this one, giving readers a signpost to indicate where they are now and where they are going. She gives readers motivation to continue to the next section. She clearly connects the topics and does not jump randomly from topic to topic. She also uses the transition to celebrate progress.

Another thing authors can do in transitions is reassure readers that everything will come together and make sense — especially important when dealing with difficult topics. Here’s an example from Functional Programming in Java by Venkat Subramaniam:

Additionally, we’re accustomed to abstracting concepts with objects. Now we can combine that with abstracting behavior using lambda expressions.

It takes some rethinking to design applications with this style of programming. We have to tune our imperative-ingrained minds to think functionally. This may seem a bit difficult at the beginning, but we’ll get used to it in no time, and can leave those dysfunctional APIs far behind as we move forward.

You can see how Venkat keeps readers motivated by this simple reassurance. You don’t want readers to give up because they are not yet feeling secure about the topic.

🛑 If you have trouble writing a smooth transition between sections, that may indicate a structural problem. Perhaps a section should be moved or removed.

We’ve addressed book, chapter, and section-level transitions. Now on to paragraphs — a finer grain type of transition.

Paragraph to Paragraph Transitions

At the paragraph level and sentence level, flow and connection means relating ideas and using connecting words and phrases. There are some words that act as building blocks in creating transitions like, “by contrast” or “similarly,” which establish relationships, and “after” or “finally.” Such words orient readers to their location in a section or an entire work. For a more complete treatment of words and phrases that help you create transitions, see this page from The Writing Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Some additional strategies for connecting paragraphs:

• Repeat key words or phrases from the preceding paragraph
• Add a contrasting statement to start a new paragraph
• Add a piece of further information that links to an idea from the preceding paragraph
• Connect ideas by explicitly mentioning their relationship
• Emphasize a single point you will expand on next
• Add a list of points you will expand on next
• Ask a question and then answer it in the next paragraph
• Acknowledge a challenge that you will address the next paragraph

❓ What additional strategies do you suggest for creating paragraph-level transitions? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

So we have our connections between chapters, sections, and paragraphs— now what?

Wrapping Up

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Your chapter transitions are smooth and meaningful, and your overall writing flow is like silk. Now what? Bring that flow to the entire piece. From your first sentence to the last, your writing needs to bring readers along and leave them with a lesson, idea, or some other takeaway. Readers should finish your content feeling like they have learned something of value.

So what have we learned here? Transitional elements connect paragraphs, sections, and chapters and move the narrative from one idea to the next. Start with a central idea and keep it present throughout the text, even if you do digress here and there.

I’ll leave you with with a couple of tips.

• Edit. For most writers, good writing transitions and flow take work. Edit your own writing, then edit it again. Then ask someone else to edit it. It’s okay, really.
• Use examples. Use concrete examples to connect to your readers and connect ideas in your book. Try relating examples using a common thread (games, sports, cooking). Examples don’t need to be one continuous project, but giving them a theme create continuity and flow.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in submitting a book proposal to The Pragmatic Programmers, read through our Become an Author page and get in touch!