Just stop and think for a moment about the online and magazine articles you have read in the last week. You probably started a lot more than you finished. What made you stop reading? Check all that apply.

• I found out what I wanted to know.
• I became angry at the writer's opinions.
• I realised I knew all that already.
• I got bored and moved on.
• The writer was telling me more than I ever wanted to know about the subject.

You may have stopped reading for one, or all, or a combination of these reasons. But I'll be the last two predominate in your experience. The writer made you bored. Or the writer kept telling you things you weren't interested in. In my experience, those are the primary reasons why we stop reading non-fiction prose. (Or even some fiction.)

It's not length. I routinely get lost in New Yorker pieces that provide indepth stories. Long after I've found the factoid I was seeking, I read on. Why? The articles are well-written, and I'm learning something I want to know. But what are these writers doing differently from the ones I cast aside?

They are paying attention to relevance. Many, many modern writers lose their audiences because they cannot stick to the subject. Readers don't have to read this, you know. They won't have to pass a test, or pay a penalty. If they're bored, they'll stop reading, and you can't make 'em come back.

Compare these texts:

Our coach was a great swinging and swaying stage, of the most sumptuous description – an imposing cradle on wheels. It was drawn by six handsome horses, and by the side of the driver sat the "conductor," the legitimate captain of the craft; for it was his business to take charge and care of the mails, baggage, express matter, and passengers. We three were the only passengers, this trip. We sat on the back seat, inside. About all the rest of the coach was full of mail bags – for we had three days' delayed mails with us. Almost touching our knees, a perpendicular wall of mail matter rose up to the roof. There was a great pile of it strapped on top of the stage, and both the fore and hind boots were full. We had twenty-seven hundred pounds of it aboard, the driver said – "a little for Brigham, and Carson, and 'Frisco, but the heft of it for the Injuns, which is powerful troublesome 'thout they get plenty of truck to read."

But as he just then got up a fearful convulsion of his countenance which was suggestive of a wink being swallowed by an earthquake, we guessed that his remark was intended to be facetious, and to mean that we would unload the most of our mail matter somewhere on the Plains and leave it to the Indians, or whosoever wanted it.

Mark Twain, Roughing It.

Pretty amusing little tale, isn't it? But do you get the point? Sure. The point is that the stagecoach was full of mail – a lot of it junk mail. And the driver planned to get rid of it by dumping it out on the prairie. Although the two paragraphs may seem to be rambling, they are really purposeful. Everything in the text is intended to get you to see that vast quantity of mail in the stagecoach. Now let's see how somebody else described this.

We don't have permission to copy this material, so I'm going to ask you to read it online. It won't take long.

This piece was shorter than the Twain excerpt. But I'm betting you got bored before you were finished. Why? Because the writer didn't stick to the subject. It's all over the place, with references to Twain's brother, the fact that he wasn't 'Mark Twain' yet (whatever that means, it's not clear), Twain's exaggerations, etc. The best sentence, though, is this one:

Fortunately, Mark had had experience on the water because the constant sway made some people seasick.

That one really breaks up the flow.

You know what a topic sentence is. It's the sentence, somewhere in the paragraph, that tells you what the paragraph is about. Do this: Find Twain's topic sentences. What is his first paragraph about? The giganormous amount of mail on that stagecoach, right? Not about anything else. That's why Twain doesn't bother reminding us of his seagoing experiences.

When you write, put a topic sentence in there. Then go back and make sure everything you write in the paragraph relates to the topic sentence.

In other words:

• DON'T go off on tangents.
• DO relate everything you're saying to the topic at hand.
• DON'T include so many qualifiers that the reader can't tell what point you're making.
• DO save those juicy irrelevant titbits for another piece. (You keep a file or notebook of such, correct?)

Keep this simple tip in mind, as practiced by Mark Twain, newspaperman extraordinaire, and you, too, will keep your reader until the last paragraph.

Of course, Roughing It has a really great story in it about a tarantula, but…

That's for another article.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

04.05.15 Front Page

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