How do I improve "flow" in my writing?

Question

Students often worry about "flow"--how well their writing moves from one point or paragraph to the next. Worries about "flow" can indicate a problem with organization, or transitions, or both.

Answer 1

As a starting point to assess your flow, read your work aloud. While presenting information in a logical, organized sequence and using appropriate and varied transitions are key to writing well, students often rely too heavily on generic outlines to ensure they hit all the boxes on a rubric. 

Most of us can recall this rote format of starting with a "hook" to catch the reader's attention and ending the introductory paragraph with a thesis statement that includes the main subtopics, which will be expounded upon in the next three tidy paragraphs. Then comes the conclusion, mirroring the introduction to the point of redundancy; it reminds the reader of the main points covered (as if the intended audience has the memory of a goldfish), brings everything together with a takeaway, and justifies why the reader should care anyways. 

That said, these sorts of text structures are very common methods of teaching writing and aren’t completely without value. The key is recognizing that they should serve just as a point from which to push off, with variation and complexity layered in as students advance. However, if students don’t get critical feedback and learn how to push beyond the boundaries of this basic outline, their writing will lack “flow,” a characteristic that is plain to see but less intuitive to achieve.

That there is no prescriptive set of universal guidelines for how to write with flow encapsulates the very concept. 

Answer 2

There are several ways to improve "flow" in your writing. The first step is often to re-read what you've written and make notes for yourself about the topic of each paragraph. (You can consider this like making an outline of your own writing, the way you might make a summary outline of something you read.) Does a paragraph really have more than one topic? Do the topics follow a logical pattern? (I can provide diagrams of possible logical sequences.) Once you're confident the organization is logical, look for your transitions. Transitions are important between sentences and between paragraphs--and it's important to know that "Furthermore" is different from "However," for example.