Writers should:

• Group similar ideas together
• Order (sequence) ideas logically
• Connect each sentence to the next

Group, Sequence, and Connect

A first draft is exploratory. Even if you’ve planned and outlined your project, ideas might pour out at random. It’s not easy to write a first draft. Give yourself permission to write prose that doesn’t yet flow:

Statements 1, 2, and 4 relate to the pressures and problems postsecondary students face. But nothing focuses these statements or pulls them together. Meanwhile, point 3 probably doesn’t belong.

Strategy 1: Group and Sequence Ideas

To solve this problem, separate out ideas into larger topics, put them in logical order, and directly identify the topics for your reader:

Here we’ve

• created two separate topics;
• put them in a logical order (problem → solution); and
• identified each with a topic sentence (1, 2).

By default, topic sentences should go at or near the start of a given paragraph. It’s also possible to put a topic sentence at the end:

Strategy 2: Connect Ideas

Grouping and sequencing help, but the ideas still feel disjointed. We need to link them more with connectives. Connectives are those little words that link, or connect, ideas together:

• Also
• Moreover
• For example, for instance
• Yet
• But
• However
• More importantly/most importantly
• In short

These connectives help you add ideas, contrast two or more ideas by showing difference, summarize, and so on. By using them, you show your readers these same logical connections. Your writing feels more cohesive as a result.

Sometimes punctuation can help in the same way. For example:

• A colon (:) often shows that an example follows.
• An em-dash (—) can be used to emphasize or add an idea—just as this one does.

The words and phrases “for example,” “also,” and “worse,” and the colon (“stretched thin:”) all link ideas together and show the relationships between them. Let’s look at what each connective is doing:

• “For example” connects the subsequent idea to the previous one as an instance or illustration.
• “Also” adds a new, equal idea onto the previous one. (In fact, the entire clause “They’re also stretched thin” is one big connective, showing the relationship between student debt and student overwhelm.)
• The colon (:) after the word “thin” shows that an example or piece of evidence is coming.
• The word “worse” comparatively weights the following idea as more important than the previous one(s), in a negative sense (i.e., one example worse than the other two).

Note you can still put the topic sentence of the first paragraph at the end:

A Closer Look at Grouping and Sequencing

The first strategy we explored separated out and grouped together similar ideas. In the case of that example, the pattern was:

• Problems postsecondary students face
• Attempts to address the issue

This sequence is logical.

One thing you might do as a writer is expand on the “problems” section. For instance, you might decide to pay special attention to the problems students face getting jobs. Now you have two parts looking at “problems” and one at “solutions.” You need to decide on the order of the two parts on problems.

One possibility is to go from most important to least important. Another is from least important to most important. (These choices assume one idea is more important than the other. Usually we can rank our ideas like this.)

Let’s say you want to zero in on job prospects as the most serious issue. Here is the topic outline, going from more important to less important:

You can reverse 1 and 2, and go from less important to more important:

You can also build out each larger topic in more than one paragraph, each with its own topic sentence, or central point.

You’ll often notice that in skillful, cohesive writing, when you extract and join together the first sentence of each paragraph, you get a logical summary of the whole piece.

For example, look at the following breakdown of eight paragraphs in a row from Anthonella Alvarez’s “Barriers in the Classroom.”

Notice the following:

• The ideas fall into three main topics (language barriers, cultural exclusion, positive signs). These are labelled with roman numerals (I, II, and III) and headings. (These roman numerals and headings do not appear in the original.)
• The first sentence of each paragraph (recorded below) is the main idea for that paragraph.
• Paragraph 4 transitions between the first two categories, showing similarity between them.
• Paragraph 8 transitions into the third topic, showing contrast (“However”).
• The ideas flow logically from one to the next. Alvarez has carefully sequenced them. Reading just these opening sentences of each paragraph, you can follow almost the entire argument.

Read the original article to see how these ideas are fleshed out in each paragraph.

A Closer Look at Connection

We saw above how you can use connectives—linking words and phrases—to show relationships between ideas.

There are two more useful techniques called “consistent subjects” and “old-new flow.”

Consistent Subjects

“Consistent subjects” means starting each sentence (or main clause) from the same perspective. For a given chunk of text (a paragraph or other group of sentences), start each main clause on the same subject or its equivalent (e.g. a pronoun). These are sometimes also called “topics.” They are what each sentence is about.

You can picture it like this:

If you remember, one of the solutions we looked at before involved adding connective words. Well, the first part of that solution also uses this technique of consistent openers:

Each sentence is about “students.” The word “students” or the equivalent pronoun “they” appears at or near the start of each sentence.

Notice how the consistent subject technique can be combined with the connectives technique (the use of “for example” in sentence 2).

You can see the same technique in one of the paragraphs in Alvarez’s “Barriers in the Classroom,” where “educators” (replaced in most sentences by “they”) is the consistent subject:

Old-New Flow

Another technique is “old-new flow.”

In your sentences, try to move from old information (what you’ve already told the reader) to new information (the point you are adding).

Repeat this process in an ongoing chain link of ideas.

Typically, each new sentence picks up where the last one left off, although there’s no hard and fast rule about this. It’s just a general pattern.

Old information is information the reader already has, typically because you’ve just given it to them:

Let’s rewrite one of the solutions above using this new technique:

Here’s another, more complex example.

The strategies we’ve looked at can be adapted and combined in various ways. The following passage uses a mix of consistent subjects and old-new flow (see if you can also spot the connectives and use of topic sentences!):

Combined, these techniques create prose that feels coherent and connected. We can see how the various ideas relate, how they build one to the next, and how they’re grouped together.

Try It! 

References

See Develop Flow References