Make Your Writing Flow | Sentences: Transitions, Subordination, and Modification

Welcome back, friend. I’m glad you’re here—and just in time to dive into our second discussion of the concept of flow. Today’s we’ll talk about how to build sentences that will help your writing flow.

A while back, we talked about how everybody wants their writing to flow but very few people actually know what that means—so we got to work fixing that problem.

In that first video, we talked about how the basic goal of flow is to reduce the friction that your readers experience as they read. If your writing flows well, your readers won’t encounter much resistance: they’ll be able to glide along, absorbing your ideas and processing your sentences with ease.

We then spent the rest of the time talking about ways that you can make your writing flow clearly from one idea to the next—our goal was to help readers grasp our meaning easily, and we called that semantic flow.

Today, we’ll be talking about a different kind of flow—syntactic flow. This kind of flow doesn’t have as much to do with your ideas as it does with the structure of your sentences. You see, the way you build sentences can have a big effect on how fluidly your readers can move through your writing.

Think of it this way—here’s a glass that we want to fill with water. We could use a nice, functional measuring cup to do the job. But, oh no, this one doesn’t seem quite up to the task. What a great big mess!

Here, let’s try it with this measuring cup. This one is built a little different—it has a spout—and that structural difference makes it so that the water can flow easily and cleanly from the measuring cup to our glass. Bottoms up!

So if sentences are anything like measuring cups (and I’m telling you they are), then the way that we structure sentences can make all the difference when it comes to making our writing flow. You don’t have to build sentences with spouts in them—but you’re doing your readers a favor if you do.

And, of course, if you’re interested in flow, and you’re eager to learn more, consider subscribing so that you’ll always have the latest from the show funneled cleanly to your screen of choice—and if you’ve already done that, thanks! You’re a hero.

Now, the flow must go on!

Transitions

To begin with, transition words can do a lot to improve the flow of your sentences. These words, or sometimes phrases, do the job of telling your readers a little bit about how your sentence fits in with the others around it.

For example, here’s a paragraph without any transitions:

Many people cook their eggs in butter. Not everyone cooks eggs in butter. Some cook their eggs in oil. Some even cook their eggs in a mixture of oil and butter. There are many good ways to cook eggs.

It’s an okay paragraph, but it doesn’t do anything to help readers see how the sentences are related to each other. It just drops one sentence after another. You can figure out how the sentences are related—but that’s exactly the issue—you would have to figure it out.

If we add some transitions, though, you can see more easily how the sentences relate to one another:

To start, many people cook their eggs in butter. However, not everyone cooks eggs in butter. In fact, some cook their eggs in oil. Furthermore, some even cook their eggs in a mixture of oil and butter. All told, there are many good ways to cook eggs.

This paragraph isn’t a masterpiece, but it does flow in a way that the original just didn’t. Instead of dropping one sentence after another, this one includes some words that tell you what to do with each sentence as it comes. The first one is the beginning. The second one provides an alternative. The third gives a factual example, and the fourth extends the discussion to a new end—at each step, the transition word tells you what the sentence is there to accomplish.

These little transition words don’t take up much space, but they do help the reader to know what to do with the sentences. Instead of leaving the reader to figure it out on their own, the transitions help the readers know how to process the information that the sentences deliver. And that’s the real goal of flow—the make it easier for readers to process what we write.

Of course, there are loads of transitions—you can find whole lists of them out there. The main point, though, is that it doesn’t take a lot to give little clues to your readers about how your sentences fit together.

Subordination

A while ago, we talked about the two main types of clauses, independent and dependent. Independent clauses make complete sense by themselves, and dependent clauses, while they have a subject and verb, don’t make complete sense alone—they depend on another clause to be complete.

When you have a sentence with an independent and dependent clause, you have a sentence where subordination is happening—and subordination can be one way to improve the structural flow of your sentences.

I think of it sort of like this: If paragraphs are staircases made up of sentences, then independent clauses are like individual steps. You have to take a full step to move from one to the next.

Dependent clauses, though, aren’t full steps—they’re more like little ramps that go between the steps. And I don’t know about you, but going up and down ramps is a much smoother ride than going up and down stairs. So taking advantage of dependent clauses can help you to smooth out the rough edges of your writing.

And if that’s a little too abstract for you, here’s a paragraph made of independent clauses:

There are many different types of pans for cooking eggs. You have many options. You should pick a pan; decide on your preferred cooking method. You may plan to fry a couple of eggs every so often. A small nonstick skillet may be enough. However, you may be more interested in poaching your eggs, and you may opt for a small saucepan. Many people have strong opinions about their eggs. It’s important to find the method and pan that will work best for you.

Again, not an especially offensive paragraph, but each independent clause is a full step: your reader has to process one clause, then process the next, and then figure out how they go together. Each sentence is a complete restart for the reader.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s the same paragraph, but now, instead of being a series of independent clauses, the sentences have been rearranged into pairs of independent and dependent clauses:

Because there are many different types of pans for cooking eggs, you have many options. You should pick a pan after you decide on your preferred cooking method. If you plan to fry a couple eggs every so often, a small nonstick skillet may be enough. However, you may opt for a small saucepan if you’re more interested in poaching your eggs. Although many people have strong opinions about their eggs, it’s important to find the method and pan that will work best for you.

When you write sentences with dependent clauses, the relationship between those clauses is baked into the sentence. Rather than asking your reader to step the full distance from one independent clause to the next, you let dependent clauses ease them from one idea to another, nice and fluid.

In some ways, dependent clauses work like transitions, but they have the added benefit of working just as well at the beginning and end of a sentence. Depending on the effect you want to achieve, you can use an introductory dependent clause to ease your reader towards the main claim of the sentence—or you can use a dependent clause at the end to let them down softly rather than with a thud.

Modifiers

As we’ve discussed before, modifiers are pretty versatile bits of language. They can go in lots of different places and do lots of different things. And one of the things that they’re best at is improving the flow of sentences.

You see, where independent clauses are big blocks of information that a reader has to process, modifiers are little additions that give your reader more information without forcing them to reset their processing with a whole new clause.

So, where our goal is to improve flow by reducing friction or processing effort that the reader experiences, modifiers are a powerful tool for keeping sentences moving along without the full stops and starts of independent clauses.

So, here’s a step by step, independent-clause heavy paragraph:

Tim had cracked the eggs. He had gathered his ingredients. He had grabbed his whisk. Tim put the ingredients in the bowl. He whisked. He mixed all the ingredients together. He put the scrambled eggs into the pan. He stirred and folded the eggs until they were ready.

And here’s a revision, transforming many of these independent clauses into modifiers to create a smoother reading experience:

Having cracked the eggs, gathered the ingredients, and grabbed the whisk, Tim put the ingredients in a bowl and whisked, mixing all the ingredients together before putting the scrambled eggs into the pan, where he stirred and folded them until they were ready.

When you run into writing that has a lot of short sentences that ask the reader to stop and start and stop and start again, try to find ways to turn some of those clauses into modifiers. Often, that involves turning the verb into a participle, ending with -ing or -ed. Sometimes it means pulling out the noun phrase and using it as a modifier for the subject of a different sentence. Modifiers are so flexible and varied that there are numberless options available to you.

The main point here, though, is that there are ways to keep readers in the flow without smashing them into another period and capital letter. The ends of sentences are spots for readers to stop and think about what came before and to prepare themselves for what lies ahead. It may happen quickly, but there’s a reason some call periods full stops—and it’s hard to flow when you’re stopped.

By reducing some clauses to modifiers, however, you can keep your readers going and reduce the number of stopping points along the way.

A word of caution: Variety is Most best

In the examples that we’ve looked at so far, you may have noticed that the flowier examples still ended up sounding a little inelegant. Sure, they were better than the original versions, but they still sounded odd.

And that leads us to an important point: while flow is our goal and while transitions, subordination, and modifiers can help us to improve the flow of our sentences structurally, it’s also possible to overdo it.

You know, there’s a reason that people like crackers in their soup and nuts on their sundaes—textural contrast is appealing. So it’s definitely possible to work your sentences into such an effortless flow that you put your readers to sleep. The examples that we showed today exaggerated the point to show the effects of these different flow-enhancing strategies, but that doesn’t mean that every sentence must or even should do one of these things.

So you don’t need to get rid of every short, blocky independent clause. Think of them like croutons or peanuts. As much as flow is a good thing, variety and contrast are even better—so don’t go crazy with it.

And, further, it would be good to keep all three of these flowy techniques in your repertoire—relying too much on one or another can make your writing flow, but overreliance on a single technique will make it flow more like a drowsy stream than an exciting river.

Conclusion

To wrap up (notice the transition),  every time a sentence ends and a new one begins, readers lose a little momentum, something that only disrupts the flow of reading for a fraction of a second. If it happens too much, though, it can be distracting and unpleasant.

So, in order to help your readers get from start to finish with less stopping and starting, you can build sentence that flow more seamlessly into each other. Whether you do it with transitions, subordination, modification—or, hopefully, a combination of all three—you set your readers up for a smoother, more fluid reading experience.

And with that, it looks like our flow boat is drifting into port. Thanks for sharing your time with me: It’s always a treat to chat. If you heard something helpful, give us a like, and flex your new flowy muscles by writing something beautiful and riparian in the comments. And, until next time, just go with the flow—well, unless you’re headed for a waterfall or something. Then, you know, maybe don’t. Anyway, see ya later!