—The Blog Series: Blog 17

Part 2: Write the Manuscript

Keep Your Readers Glued: The Top 5 Writing Techniques You Can Start Using Now! (continued)

#2—Shorter Sentences

Shorter sentences deliver the same advantages as shorter paragraphs—the perception of faster pace, and solutions that stick. It’s another super-secret fiction authors’ technique.

Naturally, you want to vary sentence length and construction to maintain reader interest, but a sentence that goes on for six or seven lines will make your readers daft, because they will lose the thread of thought that you started with, and become hopelessly mired among the tangents the concept takes, even though those winding tangents aren’t too difficult to follow in spoken communication, since the ear can differentiate the pauses and shift in topics, whereas the eye of a reader becomes boggled with the lack of pauses especially if commas and other punctuation aren’t frequently present to reveal those pauses and distinctions.

Make sense?

The basic rule—try to limit each of your sentences to a line or two.

The same word of caution as with short paragraphs: Avoid the distracting, staccato feel of too many short sentences in close proximity. You want the techniques to remain secret, invisible, so they don’t draw the reader’s attention to them and away from your valuable content.

#3—Back-Load Sentences

Back-load? you wonder. Is that anything like the tractor?

Actually, yes. It is. In fiction writing, the most important concept—the heaviest load, as it were—should be the last word in the sentence.

Why? Because the last word in a sentence is the most memorable, the one that resonates in readers’ thoughts. That makes it the most powerful. So, when you write, place the most powerful word or concept last.

This will punch up that concept, and further help the information to stick in the minds of your readers.

The word or concept should not be a soft-sounding word, but one that gets noticed. For further explanation, see the next blog post, 18, Use Words That Punch.

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The content for this blog series is taken from my book Business Gold: How to Write a Book to Spotlight Your Expertise, Attract a Ton of New Customers, and Explode Your Profits!, available at Amazon.com. (The publisher, Business Book Productions, is now PogoFish Media, owned by the author of this article).