How to Provide Better Feedback

Flow

Flow can be hard to describe beyond "this has good flow," but there are elements that are quantifiable. Let's start with an example from Writersdigest.com:

Example 1

"The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, out-distanced it at a canter."

Example 2

"The small locomotive engine came down from Selston. It was Number 4. It clanked and stumbled. It had seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner. It made loud threats of speed. It startled a colt from among the gorse. The gorse still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon. The colt out-distanced the train at a canter."

The second example is extremely jarring. But why? The second example contains the same content as the first, and that content is presented in essentially the same order, yet the passage is horribly stagnant. So clearly neither content nor order determines flow. Nor does ease of reading determine flow, since the second example is significantly easier to read than the original—even a grade-schooler could follow it.

There are four basic types of sentence structure—simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. But within these four general categories, there are many different sub-types of structure. The first example uses all four sentence types in his paragraph, not to mention many structural techniques within those four types. More importantly, seven of his ten sentences are either complex or compound-complex, the two types that permit the most variation in structure. For example, both the fourth and seventh sentences are complex, but one contains five dependent clauses and the other only one.

Since variation of sentence length results from varying sentence structure, ultimately it's our syntax that determines whether our prose flows or not. Stephen Dobyns says that syntax is like a landscape: If it's too uniform, as the second example, the prose will look more like Nebraska than Switzerland. A variety of sentence structure—and therefore of sentence length—will give our prose a more flowing, and appealing, landscape.

Therefore, some things to keep in mind for Flow:

-Does the sentence structure vary, or are there many similar structured sentences back-to-back?

-Do particular words get used repeatedly? (i.e. the word "but" is used excessively throughout the same chapter)

-Do several sentences start with the same pronoun, word, or construction? (i.e. "She sat down and looked around the room. She couldn't see any of her friends so she already knew she wouldn't stay long.")

-Is the Point of View (POV) consistent? Does it start out in first person, then shift to other characters?

-Are there abrupt changes in location, time, or focus that have nothing to signify the change?

-Does the thought pattern from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, have a thread the reader can follow, or does the reader have a difficult time following the storyline?