Ask HN: How do you write great sentences, paragraphs, or articles?

Writing advice often reiterates the same general rules: active voice, economy of expression, favour the concrete over the abstract.

These broad suggestions come at the expense of advice on micro- and macrostructure. We're missing a trick here. In particular, I believe great non-fiction writing out-punches the good because it manages not only to articulate ideas succinctly and clearly, but to show how they overlap and interconnect.

In business, while a good product is essential, it is almost always not enough. The product has to be presented to the consumer in an intuitive and sensible way. Often a product will have more than one USP, and its success hinges on which USP you chose to emphasise.

The same might be said of ideas. An argument---or point---will be convincing only insofar as it is presented to the reader in a coherent way.

To that end, do people have any tips, book suggestions, or exercises that will help writers improve their articles' unity, coherent, flow, logical structure, etc?

Just like with coding, improving your wordcraft is a two-fold process: read and write. If you are reading a lot of quality work from various genres (articles, blog posts, short stories, journalism, poetry et al), you will be constantly learning new words, sentence structures, phrasings, all the tools of writing. Then, by writing a lot you will be able to put these new techniques to use and figure out what works best with your particular approach to writing. I learned to write effective fiction and poetry (I've been published in literary magazines and been invited to read at several events) by close-reading all my inspirations and then practicing writing in their style. Once I got a feel for what made Reverdy "Reverdy", I was able to approach my own work in the same manner which results in magnitudes of improvement.

It is also imperative to constantly be rereading your older work, not only as a measure to see how much you've improved but also as a way to reinforce positive progress. If I can read an article from a few months ago that I wrote and not want to close the browser window immediately, then I consider that a worthy article and it boosts my confidence.

That being said, I have found that flow-charting ideas is good for building up the structural integrity of a piece, especially if it is more on the analytic side. You have assertions (themes, viewpoints) and then linkages between them (facts, observations). By building a flow-chart you can see how they weave and if your implications make sense. A visual overview is very helpful in this regard. It keeps your writing tight and succinct. Again, this is just a personal opinion - the writing process is a difficult and stressful one because there really are no universal "tricks" or approaches to quality, worthwhile work.

Macro advise: read a lot of material similar to what you hope to write. Write a lot, you only get better with practice. Collaborate with a good editor.

Books: The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, Shertzer's The Elements of Grammar, and Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

When I write a sentence, I use five stone questions1.

  Does it say what you mean?
  Can it be clearer?
  Can it more closely match overall tone?
  Can it be made more novel?
  Can it be made more beautiful (prosody)?

The five priorities at which the questions aim are meaning, clarity (which includes brevity), tone, novelty (avoiding cliche), and prosody (and other aesthetics).

When I've first drafted a sentence, I start from the top of the list, and ask these questions in turn. Asking them forces me to think about an answer; it prevents laziness. As soon as the answer to question suggests a possible change, I make that change, and start again from the top. I repeat until time constraints force me onward.

This is a great process, because if I have very little time, I end up concentrating only on meaning. If I have all the time in the world, I get to also play with the sound of the words, and the play of the tongue.

Questions about meaning, clarity, tone, novelty, and beauty can also be fruitfully applied at paragraph and treatise levels; but my greatest concern is usually for the sentence.

1. http://diiq.org/five_stone_questions.html

Get a copy of The Elements of Style. It's like K&R for writing. Then practice. Join a local writing group. Write essays. Keep a journal. Write letters to the editor or guest columns for the local paper. Blog. Etc. Like anything else, the way to learn something is to do it.

Edit: also read a lot, and try to identify writing that resonates with you, and then work out why that is.