So before I answer this post’s eponymous question, I’d appreciate it if you could answer these two questions before continuing:
How do you personally define flow?
What’s one thing that makes a sentence flow well?
Congratulations! I just tricked you into practicing a tutoring strategy called defining rich bits. A rich bit is a stand in for a much larger collection of ideas. The word “flow” itself is a rich bit because, according to Flower and Hayes, it “brings together a whole body of ideas and experiences which are related in the person’s thoughts.” They see defining these kinds of words as “the heart of the writer’s job—pushing potential ideas into communicable ones; that is, into language.” In other words, we tutors take the tacit and subconscious knowledge we’ve gained from reading and writing and develop it into tutoring practices. And just as I am currently challenging you to know what you mean by flow, you can do the same with writers in your appointments.
Defining Flow
So now that we’ve established why defining flow is important, let’s improve upon our definition. After some of research, I’ve observed two levels of flow: micro and macro. I’m calling the micro level “readability” because it focuses on how each word transitions to the next, and I’m calling the macro level “organization” because it focuses on how each idea transitions to the next.
Readability
So let’s start with readability. The great way to gauge this level of flow is to read something aloud, as your brain will automatically notice when a section doesn’t sound quite right. This is certainly an effective strategy and a common practice for good reason, but it doesn’t much help us to understand what makes some sentences more readable than others.
There are a lot of factors that can affect readability, but I think it mainly boils down to conciseness, which is also known concision if you’re pretentious. Generally, a sentence with fewer words is easier to follow. Two things that can add words and hurt conciseness are nominalization and helping verbs, and they usually go hand-in-hand. Consider these two sentences:
I conclude that you should review “Threat Level Midnight.”
My conclusion is that you should do a review of “Threat Level Midnight.”
Turning the action verb “conclude” into the noun “conclusion” is a form of nominalization and makes the second sentence a bit more abstract. It also necessitates the use of a helping verb, as “I conclude” becomes “My conclusion is”. This both increases word count and removes a clear action from the mind of the reader, harming overall readability. The same is true for the second part of the second sentence, as two additional words are added and the nominalization of “review” necessitates the helping verb “do”.
A simple strategy to improve concision is to go word by word with a sentence and remove anything that doesn’t change the meaning in an important way. However, there is a time and place for flowery prose, so this method shouldn’t always be implemented.
Organization
The second aspect of flow is organization, and a guiding principle of this level is the Old-New Contract. As defined by Bean, “Old information comes at the beginning of a sentence—linking back to what has gone before—while new information comes later, often in the predicate, after the sentence has linked to the old.” In a paragraph that follows this contract, the end of each sentence provides new information to the reader, then that information is repeated at the beginning of the next sentence and, as a result, becomes old information. There’s actual scientific backing to the contract’s effectiveness, as Bean says “Cognitive research applied to reading reveals that readers process information in a text by linking each new sentence to the meanings developed so far in those parts of the text already read.” I think this concept is a great resource for writers that don’t know how to organize ideas in their draft.
Flow and Language
As a final note, I think flow is a lot like language for us. We’ve been immersed in flowing writing just as we’ve been immersed in our native language, and we can produce both effortlessly. The price of this effortlessness is a lack of meta-knowledge, or knowledge of what and how we know something. However, I hope this post has served as an epistemological demystification, and may it assist you in any of your future writing or tutoring endeavors!