The Writing Craft: Diction, Sequence, Structure

How Deliberate is Your Diction?

Vocabulary choices establish your mood and tone. The word combinations in your writing is not for your indulgence but for your audience to access your intended meaning. Sometimes, when you are writing, what you mean may not be immediately clear to you, but as you choose your words you begin to discover what you want to say. Yet, this is only one aspect of your strategy. The other aspect is how you position your choice expressions for the intended effect.

In one strategy of writing creative non-fiction, for example, a motif is established by deliberate positioning of words not only to reiterate meaning but also to echo it. To capture an essence, the author creates iterations of meaning through careful attention to diction. What are you trying to emphasize? Maybe you are saying one thing more than once, but instead of emphasizing, what you’ve written is redundant. As you check your draft, flag these redundancies. Check whether you need to be more creative with the ‘repetitions’ to get that reaction you desire from the reader. Or delete them to say something only once for that effective result.

How Logical is the Sequence of Your Sentences?

Unless you are writing like Virginia Woolf, your ideas must roll smoothly in your stream of expressions. Sentence length matters. Fragments count. But they must be positioned strategically in your paragraph. A beginning sentence need not always comprise the final and main thesis. But succeeding sentences must not stray away from that progression of meaning toward a main idea.

This order of sentences isn’t always done through a cause-and-effect progression. To achieve a pace or to make the reader follow a rhythm, sentences sometimes mimic a way of breathing or living, in poetic diction.

Other series of sentences follow a hierarchy in time. This is not by indicating the clock hour, although that is also done, but by pacing their thoughts in a manner that approximates movement.

Ideas in sentences are also constructed within a space continuum. Concrete expressions are laid out following the author’s spatial orientation or recognition.

From these examples alone, it follows that a sequence of your sentences is also a signifier of meaning. Check your sentence sequence. Is there a logical progression? What is this logic exactly? As you discover the tendency of your sequence of sentences, you also deepen and enhance your voice in writing.

How Creative is Your Outline or Structure?

Any written work will leave ONE main effect to a particular reader. We recall ideas and even quote liberally from writings, but we will identify what we have read only with ONE quote or idea that stands out for us. It matters that we remember something after reading. There’s a problem when no effect or recall registers at all.

The structure itself is a pointer to a writer’s creativity. Some writers are reflexive in their styles and make statements not only with what they write but in how they write it. For a beginning writer, this tendency can be dangerous. Are your paragraphs a series of dense and confusing pointers that are not reader-friendly? Remember that any kind of writing aims to reach an audience. Check your outline and know the map of your ideas. Will the readers see your markers? Or will they get lost in the abstract structure?

Development Editing

If you're confident about your final draft, you don't need to show it to anybody. But if you need a thoughtful reader, your best bet is an editor.

Reading for Subject-Content Appreciation

What is the subject matter of your writing? How is this topic tackled and approached in related literatures?

Reading for Culture and Context Clues

What cultural highlights are visible in your writing? Did you write your biases with well-argued opinions?

Reading for Style and Originality

What style manuals helped your style in writing? What model writings did you find useful? How did they help you?