 | This is an essay on style. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | Flow in a nutshell: Reduce the burden on the reader by writing well. Remember to read and review your own writing. |
When writing an article, it is important to remember and respect the reader's ability to read uninterrupted. Interruptions cause cognitive load: when people are distracted by how the text was written, it becomes harder for them to pay attention to the information in the text. Poorly written text will be seen by readers as confusing, unorganized, or choppy.
A good way to check for flow is reading the article out-loud. The best advice for finding flow issues is to sleep on it. However, it is not required to find flow that is worse than it could be in any given mental state.
Causes
edit- Badly written semantics. While the text technically includes all of the information that should be there, it still has ambiguity.
- Inconsistent writing style or terminology.
- Inappropriate or gratuitous use of jargon.
- Having to re-interpret the sentence or skip words due to them being far too close to each other.
- Inconsistent text sequencing [1]
- Wrong grammar in general is something that detracts from flow.
- Repetitive sentence structures.
Examples
editThis change makes the text less convoluted to read, meaning it is easier for the reader to parse.
- Incorrect: "[...] while plural communities and their associated organizations emerged in greater abundance in 1990s online communities."
- Correct: "[...] while in the 1990s, online plural communities and their associated organizations emerged in greater abundance"
Automatically generated list
editExtended content
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∑ 50 items | Query runtime: 2.09 s | Last updated: 20:41, 17 November 2025 (UTC) End of auto-generated report.
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References
editSee also
edit- https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLFbFmLLP3FsIzAc1FniNwNjI9iUxGFoGW - A YouTube series on writing in a flow-y manner.
- https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/99105