This is part five in a five-part series.

The fifth installment in “Getting Your Writing to Flow” (in case you’ve missed them, here are parts one, two, three, and four) focuses on an issue that is at once more global and more local than any of the others we have covered.  It’s tone, and it’s at the very heart of your work as a writer and of your writing’s flow.  If your tone doesn’t work, your writing won’t work.

Tone is the writer’s emotional attitude toward the topic at hand.  (In the case of fiction, it would be the speaker’s attitude, which the writer may or may not personally endorse.)

A writer’s tone is sometimes paralleled with a speaker’s tone of voice.  However, a writer’s voice is something slightly different.  A writer’s voice is analogous to a personality, which is consistent day-to-day and unique to that person. 

I will use blogs to illustrate the difference between voice and tone.  Each blog in my Blogroll (at right) has a distinct voice that unifies all of the posts the blogger has written.  Voice is a perspective, a way of looking at the world, and many times a blog is successful because many readers enjoy that writer’s unique take on life.  Within a single successful blog, however, posts can have many different tones.  Depending on the topic and the writer’s thoughts and feelings about it, the tone could be passionate, content, defiant, pleading, assertive or a thousand others.

Some tones will glue your readers to the page; others will drive them away.  So, what do you need to consider to set the perfect tone for your topic?  I’m glad you asked.

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 This is part four in the five-part series “Getting Your Writing To Flow.”

The previous entries in this series focused on ways that structure affects flow.  I provided tips for structuring sentences and paragraphs (both a paragraph’s topic/wrap-up sentence and its mid-paragraph details) to improve flow.  In this post, I’ll focus on the choices a writer makes about which words and phrases he or she uses to construct sentences: a writer’s style.

When writers get to a certain comfort level with their writing, they sometimes get into bad habits.  For these writers, writing has become a tool that they use without thinking rather than an exciting, fresh experience of expression.  When that happens - and I think it happens to all of us at some point - we stop consciously making decisions about how we put sentences together in the name of “getting it done.”

As a result, a writer’s style often slides from the clear, albeit simplistic, style of the novice to the inexact, tortuous style of the apprentice.  Not “one step forward, two steps back,” exactly - more like one step forward and one step sideways. 

The two undesirable aspects of style that we will consider today are vagueness and wordiness.  The following tips will help you reframe the way you think about sentence construction so you can seek and destroy vague and wordy phrasing.  (For a related post, check out On Removing Weakifiers.)

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 This is part one of a five-part series.

“Flow” is an interesting concept.  Among productivity gurus, “flow” most often refers to that elusive sweet spot within work where you’re getting things done with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.  People used to call this state of work nirvana “the zone,” as in “I’m in the zone today; I have knocked out five projects already, and it’s only 1:30.” 

But now, it’s all about flow: you need look no further than Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience for evidence.

Among writers, flow has been a sought-after concept for a long time.  Flow is simultaneously easy to recognize and difficult to define.  It is universally desired but too often achieved by happenstance.  When I ask a group of students how they approach academic writing, at least one person usually says, “I like to read my paper over again after I’ve finished writing it to make sure it flows and to catch errors.”  It’s as if in their minds the term “flow” represents the apotheosis of all good qualities that they want their papers to have.  And actually, I quite agree with them: flow is the hallmark of good writing, and the hallmark of a good writer is attention to flow. 

So what is flow, and how can we achieve it?

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 If drafting is about exploring options, revising is about making decisions.  Decisions about what you want to say and how you want to communicate it.  Decisions about where the heart of your writing is, what’s good, and what’s not.  Decisions about whether two clauses should be joined with a conjunction or left to fend for themselves.  Decisions, decisions.

When there is junk in my writing - junk defined as anything in a draft that is not what it should be, where it should be, how it should be - it nearly always represents a decision I haven’t made.  It may mean that I’m confused about where a point is going.  Maybe I’m ambivalent about an argument’s validity or an example’s relevance.

There’s always junk in a draft, and I work hard to re-envision as I revise.  But sometimes, revision is about as fun - and as productive - as running into a brick wall.  At times like these, I convene my Mental Advisory Committee (MAC).  What?  You don’t have a MAC?  You should get one…I’ll explain.

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 In a recent post, Write To Done’s Leo Babuta (of Zen Habits fame) discussed revision as primarily a process of simplifying.  The tips he provides in that post focus on removing the inessential and the verbose (the “cluttered” parts of a piece of writing, so to speak).  Those of you who are familiar with Leo’s writerly ethos will appreciate that his definition of revision is consistent with his blogs’ values and goals.

Certainly, part of the revision process consists of pruning away those parts of the piece that don’t work.  When drafting, it’s easy to perpetrate wordy, vague sentences and wandering paragraphs in the name of getting started with a draft. 

More to the point, at the drafting stage these kinds of writing “sins” are acceptable.  The goal of drafting is to get your ideas out on paper (or on the screen) where you can work with them.  If you stop to rework every passive construction that pops into your head as you draft, you’re bound to lose some ideas.  It’s in revision that you clean, tighten, and polish your sentences.

But I like to think about revision in a different way.  For me, the most useful way to approach revision is as a process of re-envisioning.  When I re-envision, I engage the draft on several fronts.  Next time you approach the task of revision, I hope you’ll try thinking about it in the following ways.  You might find that your attitude shapes your outcome.   

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