Only Connect

Why a paragraph is like a choo-choo train.

AS YOU READ this little essay—reading any prose—you expect each word, each sentence, and each paragraph to follow from the last. Follow logically, or chronologically, or even unexpectedly: but follow, in a way that makes some kind of sense. If the sequence of thoughts is disordered or confusing, you assume you’ve missed something. Take this paragraph:

My brother is a pilot with American Airlines. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly. Flying time between Seattle and Maui is about six hours. A Boeing 747 can’t land on a runway any shorter than a mile.

Reading those sentences, you expect them to cohere. Since they don’t obviously follow one another, however, you start inventing connections between them. That’s how our reading brain works. Surely there must be a connection—after all, a human being wrote it, it’s a four-sentence paragraph, and each sentence has something to do with flight. But no.

No matter how long you puzzle over it, the paragraph never quite adds up. Is the writer implying that, like a turkey, her brother was unlikely to end up aloft? OK, then. The brother must fly the Seattle-Maui route, piloting a Boeing 747. Presumably the runway at the Maui airport is at least a mile long.

THIS IS WHY the paragraph is so hard to decipher: it’s actually just four separate, unrelated sentences. And here we have the crux of a lot of poor communication: incoherence. Good writing is clear thinking on the page. Muddled thinking often manifests as a lack of coherence, and incoherent writing is bad writing.

Here’s a more subtle example from a work setting. Suppose you get an email that reads:

We need to address government-relations issues ASAP. Our numbers for the last quarter are a significant disappointment. The leadership meeting has been moved up to Tuesday, October 15, at 2 p.m.

What, you might think, do government relations have to do with sales numbers? The sentences are sequential, and you assume the second sentence follows from the first, but the link is unclear. The boss implies a connection between his thoughts but leaves you to figure it out.

In this case, the addition of a couple of words would solve the problem. Brief connectors will show that the two sentences refer to separate issues, and that the third sentence speaks to the urgency of addressing them both.

We need to address government-relations issues ASAP. Also, our numbers for the last quarter are a significant disappointment. Hence, the management meeting has been moved up to Tuesday, October 15, at 2 p.m.

Coherence achieved.

A PARAGRAPH is like a choo-choo train. Those two conjunctions—also, hence—are like the couplings on railway cars, linking sentences together to form a coherent train of thought. Connectors (however, consequently, moreover, despite, on the other hand) help make clear the relation of one sentence to the next, and so keep the train on track, heading toward the next paragraph.

Kids who have trouble writing can often be helped along by a conjunction. A student asked to do a book report on Lord of the Flies might start out, “Lord of the Flies is about some boys who are stranded on an isolated island. A boy named Ralph is the leader. All the boys agree that their goals are survive, have fun, and send up a smoke signal so they will be found.”

Here the student gets stuck. Of the many options, what to say next? By finding an apt connector, the student is able to resume: “However, the boys start bickering and doing nothing. Also, they start to worry about a monster they think lives on the island. Then, a boy named Jack says he’ll go and kill the beast.”

Stuck again, then prompted again, the student continues: “Meanwhile, a ship sails past the island. However, the sailors don’t know that anybody’s there because the boys let the fire go out.”

EDITING DEMANDS alertness to incoherence. As an editor, you’re always asking: why this sentence, in this particular place, in this paragraph? Often, the writer has made a connection in her mind, but the reader needs a bridging word, a phrase, or maybe a sentence, between thoughts. Or maybe there’s not much connection at all, and the writer needs to rethink the whole paragraph.

We’re talking here about nonfiction of all stripes: history, biography, proposals, magazine pieces, essays, business correspondence, and so forth. As you’re writing nonfiction, remember the choo-choo train!

(P. S. Fiction is another matter altogether. Incoherent sentences in a novel or short story may signal a disturbed state of mind, genius, drunkenness, perhaps an unreliable narrator. First-person fiction is especially ripe for deliberate breaks in coherence. In which case a common fault in nonfiction may become, in a novelist’s hands, a compelling narrative technique.)