Writing with Good Flow

Maybe the most difficult skill to master in written English is having good flow between your sentences. This is a big challenge because there are really no formal rules; it’s primarily a matter of taste and preference. That said, most people will still recognize good flow in writing when they see it, even if they can’t identify why exactly it’s good. The truth is, there’s no single

secret to creating good flow, but in this article I’m going to show you three techniques that can elevate your work, and make your writing easier and more compelling to read.

Control Sentence Length

There aren’t many rules for sentences. First, they need to start with a capital letter and end with a period (or an exclamation or question mark). Second, they need to contain at minimum a subject and a verb. Third, they need to express a complete thought, and not require more information to make sense.

There’s a lot of wiggle room there to play with, and an important aspect of flow is making sure sentences are varied, and not too long in length. A common mistake for writers is creating excessively long sentences. These often provide too much information at once, and should be broken up into several smaller ones. Here’s an example:

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas, who, while he loves playing video games and watching movies, also loves riding bikes outside with his friends because Kenny has loved the outdoors and being active since Kenny was little, when Kenny’s father taught him to bike when Kenny was six years old.

This sentence is technically grammatically correct, but it is far too long. An easy way to start improving the sentence is to break it down into easily readable parts. Finding the individual ideas in a long sentence can allow you to break it down into smaller, more readable sentences.

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas. Kenny loves playing video games and watching movies. But, Kenny still loves riding bikes outside with his friends. Kenny has loved the outdoors and being active since he was little. Kenny’s father taught him to bike when Kenny was six years old.

By finding the individual, one long, over-complicated sentence became four short, easy ones. However, there’s still a lot of issues in this example that keep it from having good flow.

Use Varied Sentence Structure

When writing multiple sentences about a single subject, it’s easy to fall into the trap of beginning each sentence the same way. This is especially true when describing different facts about a person or place. Let’s look at our example with the shorter sentences.

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas. Kenny loves playing video games and watching movies. But, Kenny still loves riding bikes outside with his friends. Kenny has loved the outdoors and being active since he was little. Kenny’s

father taught him to bike when he was six years old.

A major issue with the flow here is repetition. Every sentence starts with Kenny’s name, and three of them follow the basic format ‘Kenny loves x’. We can fix this in two ways. The first is by switching between referring to Kenny by name, and referring to him by his pronoun, he or him. I personally try to avoid starting a sentence with the proper name more than twice in a paragraph unless I need to differentiate between multiple people. The second is rearranging the sentences so the similar information is not always delivered at the beginning.

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas. He loves playing video games and watching movies, but also loves riding bikes outside with his friends. Being outdoors and staying active is something Kenny has loved since he was little. His

father taught him to bike when he was six years old.

Here, I’ve changed up the arrangement of the sentences, varying the structure to make it more interesting. I realized that the second and third sentences both refer to a similar subject in Kenny’s interests, so I combined them with a comma. Notice how the flow improves when each sentence reads differently, even though the information delivered is the same. But there’s still

some small improvements we can make.

Avoid Word Repetition

One final thing I always look to change when editing my work is using the same word again and again. I’ll even do a word find (ctrl-F) in the whole document to see what words I use the most, and if I repeat them too often. One that that pops out immediately in the example is the word ‘loved’.

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas. He loves playing video games and watching movies, but also loves riding bikes outside with his friends. Being outdoors and staying active is something Kenny has loved since he was little. His father taught him to bike when he was six years old.

Any easy way to fix this is to use an online thesaurus, and replace overused words with synonyms. However, be careful and know that not every synonym will work in context for your writing. For instance, googling ‘loves synonym’ will give you ‘be besotted with’, even though that probably wouldn’t be appropriate in this context. For the example, ‘be passionate about’ or ‘be important to’ would both work in place of ‘loves’ (respecting tense, of course).

Kenny is a twelve year old boy from Topeka, Kansas. He loves playing video games and watching movies, but is also passionate about riding bikes outside with his friends. Being outdoors and staying active is something that has been important to Kenny since he was little. His father taught him to bike when he was six years old.

Finally, we have turned the bloated, confusing sentence we started with into something more manageable and pleasant to read. Using these three techniques, the sentences were given flow and interest. Develop these skills and use them in your own writing to create better work that more people want to read. To learn more about advancing your English writing skills, contact me.