Make your story move - but not too fast or slow

Chapters 3 and 4 discuss motion and pacing, and how to make sure you have both action and commentary in the right proportions. I will give you three exercises here: the first at the overall paper structure level, second at the paragraph level, and the third at the sentence level.

 Overall Manuscript Level

One way to manage motion and pacing is to make sure the various sections of your manuscript aren’t too long or too short. I give some rule of thumb section lengths (both percentages and numbers of pages) in Table 3.1 for different types of articles.

Using Table 3.1 as a guide, determine whether each section of your paper, as well as the overall body of your paper, match the values in Table 3.1. If you are substantially shorter, you may have too much motion and your pacing is too quick; You probably need to add some more commentary and elaborate on your ideas, and/or need to add more detail describing how you constructed your sample and measures, analyzed your data, and what you found. If your sections are substantially longer, then your manuscript lacks motion and the pacing is too ponderous. Go through them and look for things to cut, and ways to using shorter, clearer wording.

Paragraph Level

 Variety in sentence and paragraph length also creates a sense of motion and enhances your pacing.

A.    Starting with your paragraphs, just look at the page:

1.      If you have one paragraph for the entire page, it’s way too long. Try to break it up into two or three paragraphs.

2.      If you have two paragraphs, see if you can break them up into three, or even four.

3.      If your paper looks like USA Today, where each sentence has its own paragraph (much less typical in academic writing), then try combining a couple short paragraphs into a longer paragraph.

4.      Follow long paragraphs with a shorter paragraph, and vice versa.

5.      If you have two ideas, or a main idea and an example in the same paragraph, split them up.

Play around with your paragraph structure so that just looking at the page you can sense it’s going to move you along, but at a reasonable pace.

Sentence Level

B.     Moving on to sentences, in Chapter 4 I describe four kinds of sentences: simple, compound, complex and compound-complex. Mixing up sentences with different structures and lengths adds variety and makes a paragraph easier to read. When doing this exercise don’t try to take on the whole paper at once.

1.      Start with your introduction, and go through paragraph by paragraph identifying the types of sentences you use in each.

2.      If you have more than two sentences with the same structure in a row, rewrite the third sentence so that it’s different.

3.      If you use lots of short, simple and compound sentences, try combining to sentences into a compound-complex sentence.

4.      If you have lots of long complex and compound-complex sentences, try breaking them up into two shorter sentences.

C.     Another technique that New York Times editor Francis Flaherty suggests is to use right-branching sentences. I discuss this technique in Chapter 3, and suggest how you can use it at the paragraph level, as well. In a right branching sentence, you concentrate the action at the beginning of the sentence, followed by the commentary. You can employ the same structure at the paragraph level; the first sentence provides most of the action, and the subsequent sentences add commentary, elaborating on or explaining the first sentence. Since this will really help when it comes to building an argument, I recommend you start with the section where you develop one hypothesis, as practice:

1.      Start with your topic sentence for a paragraph, and look at where the action is. If you tend to backload your sentences by qualifying the action before actually acting, or you tend to use the passive voice, then rewrite your sentence, moving the action to the beginning and qualifying or commenting on it afterwards.

2.      If you follow one action sentence with another (i.e., there is no qualification or commentary), then try adding some commentary to the sentence before moving on to the next sentence.

3.      Do the same thing at the paragraph level. Put your action in the first sentence in the paragraph, and then expand on it.

© 2021 Timothy G. Pollock

THIS EXERCISE is BEING MADE PUBLICLY AVAILABLE to individuals for educational purposes only. It may not to be used by profit-making entities for any purpose, or packaged and resold by individuals for any other purpose. It may be used by individuals for personal use, or by instructors for classes, as long as this website is identified as the source of the exercise and no fee is charged for its use.

Back to Writing Exercises