Semicolons are one of the most feared punctuation marks around.  They’re an inexplicable mix of a colon and a comma, and they justifiably intimidate many writers.  How does one use this strange tool?    

Using semicolons can add an air of sophistication to any writing: because they’re so mysterious, semicolons are impressive to those who don’t know how to wield them.  Kind of like a samurai sword. 

But semicolons are more than fancy-schmancy punctuation.  When used confidently and correctly, semicolons give you a range of options for connecting your ideas together in a clearer, more exact manner.  And clarity and precision represent true sophistication, which impresses experts and novices alike.  After all, a fine samurai sword is likely best appreciated by samurai, don’t you think?

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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 three of a five-part series.

Thus far in our exploration of the phenomenon of “writing that flows,” we have been working at the sentence-to-sentence level of flow.  We have considered the importance of establishing continuity between sentences and presenting plenty of details.  Our overriding concern has been for what our readers will need rather than what we as writers want. 

Today, we are going to consider paragraph-to-paragraph flow.  We’ll use the same perspective we used to create sentences that flow together - what does the reader need? - but we’ll be looking at the piece from a higher altitude.  The following tips will help you look at each paragraph from your reader’s perspective; they can dramatically increase your writing’s flow.

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 This is part two of a five-part series.

Yesterday, I began a detailed examination of what makes writing flow.  The most important thing to understand about flow is that it results from looking at your writing from your reader’s perspective. 

This exhortation - to look at things from the reader’s perspective rather than your own - seems obvious to the point of truism.  By definition, writers write and readers read.  Thus, if you’re writing at all, you’re writing for readers, right?  Wrong.

The default position for a writer is writing for himself or herself.  It can be an uncomfortable process akin to an out-of-body experience to pull yourself out of your own perspective and look at things from your reader’s viewpoint.  The more you try to do it, however, the more flexible your perspective will become. 

How do details contribute to flow?  Providing an appropriate amount of detail helps to clarify the conceptual ligatures that bind your writing together. 

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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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 America is an incredibly diverse culture.  As diverse as we are, though, we seem to have one thing in common: none of us is immune to getting tripped up when it comes to whether we should say “good” or “well.” 

For years, the problem was that people said “good” when they should say “well.”  For example, it’s incorrect to say, “I did good on my test.”  Similarly, in response to the question, “How are you doing?” the answer should not be “I’m doing good.” 

Fair enough.  In general, people tend to replace adverbs with adjectives, as in “Without my glasses, I just can’t see clear” (it should be “clearly”), or “Run quick and fetch my screwdriver” (it should be “quickly”). 

But something particularly crazy has happened with the whole good/well fiasco.  Suddenly, the air is filled with, “I’m not well at it” and, “It doesn’t look well on you.”  I have heard it on television, on the radio, and in conversation.  Hmmm. 

It seems that in an effort to avoid using “good” inappropriately, some people are now using “well” inappropriately.  To help stop the madness, I have put together this quick and easy good/well review.

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 As I’m sure you know, pronouns serve a key function in written communication.  Because they have the power to stand in for nouns, they add remarkable ease and convenience to our everyday discourse. 

Just to review - in case it has been a while since you diagrammed sentences in middle school English class - here is a list of common pronouns:

I, me, you, he, she, him, her, it, we, us, they, them, who, whom, that, which, this, his, her, its, their, our, your, my

Don’t forget indefinite pronouns, like:

everybody, anything, each, either, nobody, no one, anyone, everyone, everything, nothing, somebody, something, someone, anybody

(We won’t be dealing with indefinite pronouns in this post, however.)

Pronouns are humble little words, but they have great power.  Without pronouns, we’d all have to speak and write in a stilted, repetitive manner: Loren would have to use Loren’s name every time Loren wanted to refer to Loren.  Loren’s readers would soon grow tired of reading Loren’s name, no doubt.  Pronouns give Loren and Loren’s readers more options, because using pronouns Loren can communicate to Loren’s readers without Loren having to repeat “Loren” so many times.

Okay, enough of that.  You see what I mean, I hope.  A world without pronouns would be a world full of bloated paragraphs instead of sleek sentences.  No one would spend time reading blogs for fun, that’s for sure.

What I want to think about today, however, is not merely the importance of pronouns.  I want to explore certain pronouns’ potential impact on readers, using blog writers and readers as an example.

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 In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss notes that in excess, almost anything takes on the characteristics of its opposite.  When do possessions become clutter?  When there are too many of them.  

I propose that we start applying this principle to writing, beginning with the plague of intensifiers that has descended upon written English.  An “intensifier” is just what it sounds like: a word that, when attached to another word, is designed to communicate increased intensity.  “Very,” “really,” and “extremely” are three examples.

There is nothing wrong with the concept of an intensifier.  For example, a paper that earns a grade of B- might be called “good,” while a B paper is called “very good,” a distinction that has a difference. 

But we have overused intensifiers.  Indeed, we use them so much, and so often, that they have lost their intensity.  Even as I write this, I am tempted by specters of intensifiers whispering, Wouldn’t it be better to say that we have “seriously lost the vast majority of” our intensity?  Wouldn’t that be - how to say - a really freakin’ cool sentence? 

Let’s face it: intensifiers really don’t add very much emphasis.  Nope.  They really don’t add very much at all.  A better term for these words is “weakifiers”: they add words to your sentence, but they don’t have a strong enough purpose to justify their inclusion.  Therefore, those intensifiers weaken your sentence.  They are weakifiers.

Now that we know what weakifiers do (clog up our writing) and don’t do (add the emphasis we want to convey), how can we communicate intensity in writing? 

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