Make Your Writing Flow | Ideas: Cohesion, Coherence, and Organization

HI there, today we’re tackling that most elusive of qualities—you already know what I’m talking about—it’s flow.

Whenever I’m around people who are talking about the characteristics of good writing, the word flow comes up more often than any other. People love writing that flows, and they hate writing that doesn’t.

So everyone wants flow, but I’ve never really heard anyone say what flow is. And, let me tell you, it can be pretty frustrating to make your writing flow when you don’t even know what that means. In fact, the mysteriousness of the word flow may be why some people think writing is some arcane talent that only a chosen few have.

But the fact is that flow isn’t as mysterious as we sometimes make it out to be, and anyone can make their writing flow if they know what to look out for. That is, you don’t have to be the chosen one to write with flow, and today we’re going to pull back the curtain of mystery and talk about some of the really practical secrets of flow.

More specifically, I want to spend some time talking about how to make your ideas flow together, something we’ll call semantic flow. In future videos, we’ll talk about how you can build sentences that flow and how you can even make the sound of your writing flowy and nice—so be sure to subscribe so that you’ll know when those videos come out.

In the meantime, though, let’s start out by understanding what flow even is in the first place.

What is flow?

Forget writing for a second—what does flow mean in other contexts? If we look at things that flow, what can they tell us about the qualities we’re trying to emulate in our writing?

Water is probably the most flowy thing that I can think of—so what is water doing when it flows? Well, it’s sort of effortlessly following its path. Rivers flow downhill, the tides flow in and out, take a drink, and the water will flow easily and refreshingly down your throat.

I’m no scientist, but I do know that water can flow because water molecules are free to move past each other. They don’t get stuck when they bump into each other; they just keep going. They just flow, and they don’t resist gravity or each other.

We could also think about the related words fluid and fluent. Both of these words have to do with flow. And you can imagine someone doing something with a fluid motion—it’s not erratic or halting—it’s smooth, without resistance. And if someone speaks a language fluently, they’re not stopping to figure out each word—the words just flow out without resistance.

And, at least for our purposes, it’s that lack of resistance that is most important. When writing flows it presents minimal resistance to the reader. So, if you want to make your writing flow, you want to write in a way that prevents your reader from getting stuck. You want your reader to move smoothly and effortlessly through your writing.

Now, like I mentioned before, there are a few aspects of writing that we can pay attention to when we’re talking about flow, but, today, I want to focus on just one of them—the flow of ideas. This is what we’re calling semantic flow, after the branch of linguistics that deals with the meanings of words, because when we’re working on semantic flow, we really want our readers to get what we mean without having to stop and ask for help.

In fact, I want to talk about three key ways what you can make your meaning flow in your writing. Each of these strategies will help you to provide your readers with a path of least resistance so that they can understand your ideas without getting frustrated or giving up.

Old before New

It’s less of an issue now, but, in the far distant past when people had to wait a week between episodes of a TV show, it could sometimes be difficult to remember everything that had happened the week before. Add to that chance that viewers might have missed an episode somewhere along the way, and you wind up with plenty of opportunities for viewers to be confused because they don’t have the context for what’s going on in a particular episode.

That’s why, for shows where continuity between episodes is important for audiences to understand what’s going on, a lot of shows will start with a recap of what happened earlier in the season. It’s a way of providing a path of least resistance—viewers don’t have to go back and watch the whole season to remember what happened, and they don’t have to spend the whole time asking the other people in the room what’s going on.

Episode recaps are a great illustration of an important strategy for improving flow in your writing—helping your readers to find their footing with old information before presenting them with new information. Just like with episode recaps, you want to make sure that your reader knows what’s going on before you launch into your paper.

This is why, as we mentioned when we talked about introductions, it’s so important to provide your reader with context at the start of your paper. You have spent a long time researching and thinking and writing about your topic—you’re like someone who is in the middle of a season of a show. You can’t just drop a reader in mid-season and expect them to have an easy time getting into the flow of things. Ease them in by giving them an episode recap to introduce them to your topic.

The first encounter with your paper should be inviting and easy to get into. A paper that starts with complex terminology and unfamiliar concepts is not going to ease your reader into the flow—it’s going to carry them away with the flood. They’ll feel overwhelmed, confused, or like they aren’t smart enough for your paper—and you never want a reader to feel stupid.

It’s also easy to see how this old-before-new principle works on smaller scale. Here is a paragraph that doesn’t adhere to the principle at all:

An ornithophile and mixed-media muralist, Heather Partridge woke up ready to take on a day full of her favorite activities. Tanagers and orioles are Heather’s favorite birds, so she wanted to find some to inspire her latest work. Down by the river, the large tree was a favorite spot for birds of many kinds, and that is where Heather decided to start. Cackling and fluttering filled the branches of the large tree. The sun gleamed in Heather’s eyes while she searched for birds. By mixing concrete, pigment, and scrap metal, heather was finally able to create a stunning representation of her favorite birds for a mural next to the ice cream parlor downtown.

Take a look at this paragraph, at every turn, this paragraph throws brand new, uncontextualized information at the reader. You jump from Heather waking up to specific names of birds, and then suddenly you’re at a tree by a river with no indication of how you got there. Also, the sun is suddenly there, but only for a moment—then you’re looking at concrete and pigment that, once again, has appeared out of nowhere.

Now, if you took some time and looked at this paragraph as a whole, you could figure out the sequence and come to terms with all the information that it throws at you. It’s not that this paragraph is incomprehensible—but it is providing more resistance to the reader than it needs to—it doesn’t flow as well as it could. But we can rewrite it, putting old information before new information and giving readers the context they need along the way.

As soon as she woke up, Heather Partridge, a bird lover and mixed-media artist, was ready for a great day of work. Heather especially loves tanagers and orioles, so she was determined to find some to inspire her latest project. She knew that birds of all kinds like to visit the tree down by the river and decided to head there first. The tree was full of cackling and fluttering birds. Heather peered through the branches, shielding her eyes from the sun and searching for tanagers. After her walk, Heather was inspired to create a stunning representation of her favorite birds in a mural by the ice cream parlor downtown by mixing concrete, pigment, and scrap metal.

See how each of these sentences begins with information that the reader has already encountered before? People know about waking up in the morning, Heather isn’t a stranger by the second sentence, and we know how we got to the tree—it doesn’t just appear.

All the same ideas are here—but they flow much more smoothly. Readers don’t have to reset and reprocess at the beginning of each sentence because the connections between the sentences are clearer. The only thing that really changed is that we put old information before new information—the start of every sentence points back to a sentence that came before it in some way.

The result of following this principle is often called cohesion. If you create smooth transitions between ideas by using things your reader already knows to ease them into something new, you’re writing cohesively. And cohesive writing flows.

Coherence

Have you ever gotten stuck listening to someone who has a hard time staying on topic? One second they’re talking about the weather, the next they’re talking about a great video they watched on writing conclusions, and then they’re off on a tangent about the one time they spilled ice cream and their pet goat sat right on top of it. Listening to monologues like that can be difficult because they lack coherence: they’re made up of so many different pieces and ideas that it’s hard to understand why they’re all together. They don’t flow.

The goal of writing coherently is to arrange your ideas into consolidated units. Your paper should be about one overarching topic. Each paragraph should be a contained unit that contributes one main point to the paper, and each sentence should be doing one thing to contribute to the paragraph.

In other words, it should be clear to your reader why a group of sentences belongs together in a paragraph and why a groups of paragraphs belong in a paper. If your reader is too busy trying to figure out how and why your ideas fit together, your writing is going to present more resistance than it needs to. By making sure that each part of your paper is focused around a single main idea or purpose, you’ll give your reader a much easier time flowing through your work.

So, for example, here’s a paragraph that leaves a lot to be desired coherence-wise:

Good writers write coherently. As one noted critic observes, “I don’t even want to know about writing that goes off on strange tangents” (Mortuum 10). So writing should always be focused. I think the best way to revise is to cut out ideas that don’t fit. All in all, strong papers are to-the-point and centered on one idea.

Now, this paragraph is at least doing an okay job of staying on topic, but the sentences aren’t working together as well as they could. Strictly speaking, the first paragraph is about writers, the second is about the observation of a critic, the third is about writing, the fourth is about the author’s opinion, and the last is about strong papers. These are all related ideas, but they’re all different ideas. A thoughtful reader can reconcile the disjointed subjects of each sentence, but these sentences could do more to work together—to be coherent.

So here’s a more coherent revision of the same paragraph:

Good writing is coherent because, in the words of one noted critic, “[Readers] don’t even want to know about writing that goes off on strange tangents” (Mortuum 10). So good writing needs to be focused, and that focus can be achieved by cutting out ideas that don’t fit. All in all, strong writing is to-the-point and centered on one idea.

None of the information in this second paragraph changed—but you can also see that all of the sentences are clearly and explicitly about the same thing—good writing. In this second version the reader doesn’t have to take four disparate ideas and then find what they have in common on their own—all the sentences are clearly and explicitly contributing to the same topic. Instead of getting hung op connecting the threads, the reader can just flow along and take it all in.

So coherence involves making sure that all the pieces of your work go together, whether that's- sentences in a paragraph or paragraphs in a paper. And it also involves making it easy for your reader to see that they fit together and how they fit together. You don’t want a reader trying to figure out why two sentences are next to each other in the same paragraph.

And that, combined with our cohesion principle leads us to another important thing to keep in mind—try to avoid teasing what’s next at the end of a paragraph. I’ve seen this really commonly in the papers that I’ve graded: writers get excited about what they’re about to write about, so they mention it at the end of the paragraph before switching topics.

But, hopefully now you can see why that’s a problem—not only does it introduce a sentence that doesn’t fit in the paragraph, but it puts the transition at the wrong place. Remember, old information goes before new information—so you should normally put transitions at the beginnings rather at the ends of your paragraphs. By teasing the next paragraph at the end of the previous one, you create a kind of cliff hanger, starting a new topic that doesn’t get addressed until later, something that disrupt the flow and leave the reader wondering why you brought something up now only to talk about it later.

Organization

This last principle for semantic flow is maybe a more generalized expression of the previous two principles. And it is that, whatever you do in your writing, your ideas should be structured and presented in a way that makes sense.

For example, recipes will usually list the ingredients in the order that you add them to the dish. Recipe writers could list the ingredient alphabetically or by quantity, but that wouldn’t make the most sense for someone who is cooking. By listing the ingredients in the order that they should be added, recipe writers minimize the resistance that cooks will face when reading the recipe. It’s an order that flows most naturally into the purpose of the recipe.

So you should be thinking about the progression of ideas that makes the most sense for your reader. There should be some reason that your ideas are in the order they’re in, whether it’s by chronology, importance, or scale.

Many arguments, for example, will present a claim first, follow that with evidence, and then explain how the evidence supports the claim. There’s a reason for that order because it allows the writer to state where they stand and then show the reader why it’s a valid position.

Histories often put ideas in chronological order—and that makes intuitive sense. Your history textbook wouldn’t flow very well if it just listed important events at random or in the order of the author’s preference from favorite to least favorite.

And if you’re trying to find a diagnosis based on a list of symptoms, the possible causes might be listed in order from most likely to least likely. Again, the organization of ideas helps the reader to see how the ideas fit together, minimizing confusion, resistance, and hypochondriac meltdowns.

So, whatever you do, make sure it’s organized in some kind of way that will be clear and make sense to your and your readers. Anytime you give your reader a chance to get stuck wondering why you said what you said where you said it is a moment where you risk the loss of flow. By putting your ideas in a clear, logical sequence, though, you can keep things flowing right along.

Conclusion

In the end, flow is about writing that is easy to read, writing that won’t give your readers a hard time. One of the main ways you can make your writing flow is to make sure that your ideas flow clearly and easily from one thought to the next. As we discussed today, you can accomplish that by:

1. Presenting old information before new information, easing your readers through your work by writing cohesively

2. Ensuring that the ideas you put together belong together, showing your readers why ideas go together by writing coherently

3. Putting your ideas in an order that makes sense, helping your readers to understand your thought process by writing with structure

As we move on with this series, we’ll discuss other ways to make your writing flow at the syntactic and phonetic levels, so stay tuned for more.