The Venn Diagram approach to writing calls attention
to the mix of old information and
new information you'll want to build
into your sentences to help readers
easily follow along. You don't want a situation where you have a
collection of material in one sentence followed by a completely unrelated
collection of material in the next sentence. That kind of writing comes across
as choppy and disjointed. You also don't want a situation where you have
a collection of material in one sentence and
pretty much the exact same collection of material
in the next sentence. That kind of writing comes across
as boring and repetitive. Instead, you want some overlap
between your sentences. You want a Venn diagram. Of course, if you don't find that idea of a Venn
diagram helpful, you can also think of
sentence flow like passing a baton between
two runners on a relay, or creating a door
between two rooms. The baton metaphor reminds us that the second
sentence needs to take something from the first sentence in order to make its
own contribution. The door metaphor highlights the shared space
between sentences. Regardless of which
metaphor you choose, and I certainly encourage you
to come up with your own, the key point is that to be
an effective communicator, you're going to need to combine
old and new information. "The familiar will
comfort people," advises the Harvard Business Review Guide to Persuasive Presentations. "The new will stimulate them
and keep them interested." In The Content Trap: A Strategist Guide
to Digital Change, management professor Bharat
Anand even notices that a similar tactic helps explain a lot of successful
marketing efforts. Franchises and sequels,
covers, and same-name apps, vertical integration
and bundling, backwards spillovers
and traffic machines -- all are responses to the
challenge of getting noticed. The solutions are all similar: Use known products to
market unknown ones. If you think great content
alone will do the trick," he says, "you're likely
in for disappointment. You need product connections, too." The same is true when writing. You could create the
most individually beautiful sentences in the world, but unless those sentences flow in and out of one another, unless you figure out some way to establish strong
connections between them, you'll be doing a
real disservice to your ideas as well
as to your readers.