If You Want Your Writing to Achieve Perfect Logical Flow, click here:
In this article, we will be discussing how to achieve perfect logical flow in your writing, in order to write better fiction, content, poetry, etc.
Have you ever read famous novelists, poets, dramatists or short story writers and wondered how on earth they had such beautiful sentences interwoven between each other to end up giving you Utopia-like dreams? Have you ever read an article, blog post, essay, or opinion piece that transended the regular one you see online, in newspapers and on the list of winning or short-listed essays for an essay competition and you didn’t need anybody telling you to read the writers profile and reach out to them for more info or even lessons on how to make your work stand out? This secret ingredient is called logical flow and in this piece, you’re going to learn to do it too.
Make your words and sentences have logical connections between each other:
Throwing unrelated sentences that don’t make sense when read side-by-side is the bane of illogicallity. Make the readers go with the flow by giving them a logical sequence of narrative thought. Take a look at this: what if I was talking about a shawarma joint like this
Shawarma King was thronged that day. Customers who were around even formed as many as four lines. What on earth do this people do apart from their sweet peppery sauce? Are they into “Juju” (charm) ? I almost got crushed by a car when I was trying to look in properly, since I could not even see the inside from close proximity to the counter. Same thing was the case for UBA. The line extended beyond the canopy they put for people to stand outside, even though it was curved by the people at the end, because of the sun. Many were also sitting on the brief wall connected to the UBA bank building. Some stood outside the line but flashed warning stares at new entrants like me, just to indicate that they also had a stake in that line. I asked who was the last, an albino pointed himself, I firmly stood behind him till I was next in line to withdraw. And Kamsy called.
and instead of transitioning from that to the way it was similar to the UBA bank I started talking about the best footballers in the world or the latest in fashion? Wouldn’t your concerntration plummet down a blackhole never to be seen again? My best descriptions of unconnected ideas are roadblocks that users have to change gears to get around, illogicallity is like using blue pen, red pen, green pen and black pen to write instead of having them come at the right time and at certain intervals, unconnected sentences are like building a road smackdab in the middle of the desert, this road leading to nowhere.
You wouldn’t want to follow a train of thought, a description, or a new idea, only for it to lead to nowhere.
Use reader friendly words to address or drescribe one idea, point or sentence at a time; use transitional words like and, or, moreover, however, furthermore, this helps the reader flow with your writing. Also use commas, semi-colons and em dashes to spice up the work.
Transitions are bridges conveying your readers from the real world of perceptive experience to the otherworlds creative reality. Now does this last sentence have a logical connection? I’ll leave you to decide that.
Make good use of topic sentences: Topic sentences are sentences which usually appear at the beginning of the paragraph and sumamarizes the main idea of the paragraph. That description in itself is a topic sentence. Topic sentences are usually taught in secondary schools because in academic writing, topic sentence is king. Even though topic sentences usually appear in expository and academic writing, it’s also seen in fiction too. Taking the example from my novella above we see that I first wrote Shawarma King was thronged that day. This formed an introduction for the line at UBA where people are also filled. However, in fiction, the topic sentences may not come as oneliners or sentences in themselves, they mostly come as descriptions or appear in dialogues. Take note, topic sentences must not appear at the beginning of the sentence or paragraph but a careful reading of them can describe the whole paragraph, in order words, you wouldn’t need to read the whole paragraph again after reading a topic sentence.
Stick to clear, concise wording: this is what editors actually do to your writing, they break it down into clear and concise words. They cut out excess descriptions, words that are not needed or are not supposed to be in the place they are (they cut out excess descriptions and unnecessary words. Isn’t this better? See what I did?) Stacking up phrases, clauses, descriptions and whatnot won’t do you any good if at the end, your reader didn’t understand your writing.
Avoid repetition by changing your wordings and the structure of your sentences: This is another skill that makes a good editor, the ability to find the most insidious repeatitions and hack them down, change repeated words mostly with the help of a thesaurus, and structure your sentences by applying the correct syntax. This is especially a good technique for fiction writers who have an audience who read mostly for entertainment (who have the majority of their audience reading for entertainment): if you were an editor looking to choose which would you take? The use of varied structure, sentences and style makes your work unputdownable. Intrigue your readers by your thoughts and the manner you present your thoughts.
Conclusion:
Having gone through the guide on how to achieve a perfect logical flow in your writing by using logical connections between each sentence, topic sentences, clear and concise wording and changing the wordings and structure of sentences. I wish you happy sentence composition and better writing days ahead.
