Does your writing ever feel clunky? Do you struggle to transition between ideas? Is it challenging to express your ideas properly?
If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, you may be struggling with flow. At University, students frequently receive the feedback, “your writing doesn’t flow,” but what does that mean?
To find out more about flow, and how to write assignments with smooth sentences and perfect paragraphs, watch our Lightning Session!
[To skip the intros, head straight to 1:54]
In the recording, we discuss how to make your writing flow, both over the essay as a whole, and down at the sentence level. Here, we’ll share our top three tips:
Outline Your Ideas
To make your essay flow, planning is essential. If you just start writing, your ideas will likely be disjointed, and all out of order. Creating an outline before you start writing allows you to plan the order for your ideas, so that they can build on each other in a logical structure.
Use Transition Sentences
The first and last sentences of each paragraph are essential for linking your ideas together. Use the first sentence of each paragraph to link back to the previous paragraph. This demonstrates that your ideas all flow together.
Example:
Last sentence of the first paragraph: “Thus, penguins are the friendliest kind of bird.”
First sentence of second paragraph: “In contrast, puffins are far nastier than penguins.”
As you can see, the first sentence of the second paragraph picks up on the ideas of the first paragraph, demonstrating that the paragraphs are connected. Transitions like this help your essay flow seamlessly between ideas.
Sentence Structure
Within a paragraph, the best way to make your writing flow is to vary your sentence structure. Some sentences can be short. Others can be longer and more meandering, expressing complex ideas and tying concepts together. Using a variety of sentence lengths makes your writing flow better.