Let Readers Know Where Your Sentence Is Going

As you do at the paragraph level, use conjunctions and transition words as signposts to indicate where your sentences are continuing along a straight path of thought and where they’re heading in a new direction.

Put your signposts, particularly ones that signal a change, where they’ll be most helpful — before your readers have started to lose their way:

image I love reading the band’s tweets, checking out their links, and sharing them with friends. Some of my friends tell me that they like to just listen to the music and use their phones to send their own tweets and photos, however.

By the time readers get to the signposting word however, they will have had to figure out for themselves that the writer is making a distinction between how he responds to the band and how his friends do.

image . . . Some of my friends, however, tell me that they like to just listen to the music and use their phones to send their own tweets and photos.

Putting the signpost earlier signals readers that a change in direction is under way. Coming after Some of my friends, which follows a first-person sentence, the transition word however further suggests that the change has to do with a difference between the writer’s response to the band and his friends’ responses.

Give readers information at the beginning of the sentence that they will need to make sense of what follows. Long sentences are the most likely to leave readers feeling lost or misled. Suppose, for instance, a long sentence describes something that could have happened in your town yesterday but ends with the information that the event took place in Australia 150 years ago. Readers will probably wish they’d known that from the start.

Make sure, too, that readers will have no trouble understanding what any pronouns you use are referring to. Pronouns that come before their antecedents are likely to be confusing:

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