Chain old information to new

Choppy writing has a signature. Each sentence is fine on its own, but read together they lurch — William calls it the Busan taxi-driver effect: the driver hammers the gas on and off, and the passenger in the back gets jerked forward and back the whole way. The cause is almost always the same. Sentences that open on information the reader hasn't met yet, so every one of them starts from cold.

How it works

Give the reader old information before new. End a sentence on the idea the next sentence will begin from, so the two hand off cleanly. "…venture capitalists who harness network effects. Network effects are triggered by the concentration of active users…" — the second sentence opens on the words the first one closed with, and the seam vanishes. It is the opposite of the order that feels natural to a writer, who already knows what is coming and wants to lead with it.

Why it matters

Flow is not a mood; it is a mechanical property you can engineer. When each sentence begins on familiar ground, the reader spends no effort working out how it connects — the connection is already made — and can put all their attention on what is new. Cohesion built this way is also what lets a reader keep momentum through genuinely hard material.

Old before new, inside the sentence too

The principle runs inside a sentence, not just between them. Readers learn like a tree — as Musk describes learning anything — each new leaf hung on a branch they already have, so a sentence has to hand them the familiar thing before the new one. Think of it as a battery: a sentence "lights up" and informs only when it connects a familiar terminal to a new one; all-old and the reader tunes out, all-new and they get lost. Often the words are all right and only the order is wrong — put the old information at the start of the sentence and the new at the end, and choppy prose flows. Do that consistently and the sentence-beginnings all link back to one thing: a clear focus, or topic string, that turns a run of sentences into a coherent unit.

The baton and the briefcase

There is a cognitive reason this works. Of everything in a sentence, the ending words are what the reader packs into memory and carries into the next — so the end of one sentence and the start of the next are a relay race, the baton passing hand to hand. "At noon, in the crowded cafeteria, Sarah sat across from her mother. The two women, staring at their untouched coffee…" — "Sarah and her mother" become "the two women," and the sentences shake hands. Put the word you want carried forward last, and the next sentence can reach back and grasp it.

Try it

1. Read a rough passage and mark where each sentence starts. Sentences that open on ideas the reader hasn't met are your choppiness.
2. Reorder so each sentence ends on the hook the next one needs.
3. Where you must introduce something new, place it at the end of a sentence and let the next sentence begin from it.

Common pitfalls

Chaining nothing but old information, so the passage glides smoothly toward no point — cohesion without coherence. Flow is necessary, not sufficient: the linked sentences still have to share a topic and build an argument, or you get a passage that slides pleasantly from Portland coffee to your father's typewriter and means nothing.

End sentences with information that the next sentence can pick up and continue. This creates a handoff between your two sentences and gives your readers a sense of flow instead of choppiness.

WILLIAM · 9 TECHNIQUES FOR CLEARER WRITING · 2026

A writer wants to lead with what's new. A reader needs what's old first.

Drawn from

• William, 9 Techniques for Clearer Writing (I Wish I Knew Sooner) (Writer Science, 2026).
• William, How to Write So Well that Readers Stop Scrolling (Writer Science, 2025) — the relay-race baton and the ending words the reader carries forward.
• William, Exactly How to Make Your Writing Flow (Writer Science, 2025) — the knowledge tree and the battery; old-before-new inside the sentence.
• Joseph M. Williams, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace — cohesion and the old-before-new principle.
• Related: Put the idea where the reader expects it, Characters as subjects, actions as verbs.