100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Don’t acknowledge when you should explain
Twelve ways to avoid making your reader hate you

Many writers try to force transitions to do work that should have been done elsewhere in the story or article.

In the 1930’s, adventure serials with cliff-hanger endings were popular in the London monthlies. At the end of one installment, the writer had his hero, Ben, trapped at the bottom of a dark and slippery twenty-foot pit with no tools, no ladder, and nobody around to hear his cries. For a month people all over London discussed Ben’s plight. How would good old Ben get out of this mess? Unfortunately, the writer of the serial was wondering the same thing, and by the time his deadline arrived he had not come up with a clever solution. So he began his episode with, “After Ben got out of the pit, he proceeded to walk toward the city,” a transition that put his readers into a lynching mood and did serious damage to the writer’s career.

“After Ben got out of the pit” would be a perfectly decent transition if climbing out of a twenty-foot pit were as routine an activity as driving to a church. The reader will accept your acknowledgment of changes in time or place only if those changes could have been accomplished in normal, routine ways, or in unusual ways that you have made believable earlier in your story. If you tell us on page 1 that Superman can fly, we will have no trouble later on accepting the transition “On Tuesday Superman flew to Clinton, Massachusetts.”

When you find yourself having difficulty moving from one section of an article to the next, the problem might be due to the fact that you are leaving out information. Rather than trying to force an awkward transition, take another look at what you have written and ask yourself what you need to explain in order to move on to your next section.