Writing Engaging Prose

Anyone? Anyone?

Varying elements in your writing will help you avoid dry, monotonous prose.  Here's a short list of common elements you can vary in your writing:

• sentence length
• sentence structure
• sentence type
• tone
• vocabulary
• transition words and categories
• types of evidence

Let's look a bit closer at these elements.

Varying Sentence Structure

Structure:  The easiest way to vary sentence length and structure is with clauses. Multi-clause sentences can connect related ideas, provide additional detail, and vary the pattern of your language.  A common problem in prose is choppy sentences.  Combining independent clauses with a comma and conjunction is an easy way to fix this.

Length:  Longer sentences are better suited for expressing complex thoughts. Shorter sentences, in contrast, are useful when you want to emphasize a concise point.

Interrogatives:  Questions can catch your reader’s attention. They also implicate your reader as a participant in your argument by asking them to think about how they would answer the question.  Questions are also a great way to transition to new ideas, though be careful not to overuse them.

Tone:  If you really want a sentence to stand out, you can change the tone of your writing. Using different tones can catch the reader’s attention and liven up your work. That means you can be playful with your reader at times, sound demanding at times, and cultivate empathy when that feels appropriate.

Be careful that the tone you choose is appropriate for the subject matter.

Syntactical Variation

Here is an example of what a paragraph with a repetitive syntax looks like:

Looking Backward was popular in the late nineteenth century. Middle-class Americans liked its vision of society. The vision appealed to their consumption habits. Also, they liked the possibility of not being bothered by the poor.

Choppy?  Uninteresting?  Here’s the rewritten version, with attention paid to sentence variation:

The popularity of Looking Backward among middle-class Americans in the late nineteenth century can be traced to its vision of society. The novel presents a society that easily dispels the nuisance of poverty and working-class strife while maintaining the pleasure of middle-class consumptive habits.

What’s different here?

The rewrite simply combines the first two and the last two sentences and adds a bit of variation in vocabulary, but the difference is powerful. Of course, if all the sentences were compounded like these, the paper would begin to sound either pretentious or exhausting. If this were your paper, you might want to make the next sentence a short one and get to your thesis statement soon.

Varying Vocabulary

One way to avoid appearing overly repetitive is to consult a thesaurus and use synonyms. However, when using synonyms, you should make sure that the word you choose means exactly what you think it means (“Penultimate,” for example, does not mean “the highest,” and there’s a difference between “elicit” and “illicit.”) Check the connotations of synonyms by looking up their definitions.

Varying Transitions, Signal Words, Pointing Words, and Pronouns

Writers who are familiar with their own habits will sometimes research a word or phrase they typically overuse (“however,” “that said,” “moreover”) and replace some of those words with another transition, or they might rework a sentence to avoid using any transition words in that spot if they feel they’re overdoing it.

Nouns, too, often get overused when pronouns would sound more natural. Don’t worry about this too much in the writing phase. You just want to get your thoughts on the page. But as you revise, keep an eye out for repetition and switch things up a bit to keep your paper interesting.

Variation benefits not only your reader but also you, the writer. Conceiving of different ways to communicate essential elements of your argument will allow you to revisit what makes these elements essential and to consider the central argument you are making.

Each variation is a chance to introduce nuance into your writing while driving your point home. However, variation should never be your main goal—don’t sacrifice audience comprehension to achieve stylistic virtuosity. You’ll just sound silly. The argument is the point.