Wikipedia:Reading flow

This is an essay on style. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

flow in a nutshell: Addressing a reader's cognitive load is an important thing to do

While writing a WP:ARTICLE, it is important to respect the reader's ability to not be interrupted because it causes cognitive load. On a further note, this is due to people paying more attention to how the text was written, rather than the information contained within the text. When they focus more on the text, readers will often say that the text is confusing, unorganized, or choppy.

A good way to check for flow is reading the article out-loud. Though, the best advice for looking for flow issues is to sleep on it. However, it is not required to find flow that is worse then it could be in any given mental state.

• Badly written Semantics. The text includes the information that should be there, but still has ambiguity.
• Inconsistent writing style or terminology use.
• Having to re-interpret the sentence or skip words due to them being far too close to each other.
• Inconsistant text sequencing ^[1]
• Wrong Grammer in general is something that detracts from flow.
• Repetitive sentence structures.

This change makes the text less convoluted to read, meaning it is easier for the reader to parse.

• Incorrect: "[...] while plural communities and their associated organizations emerged in greater abundance in 1990s online communities."
• Correct: "[...] while in the 1990s, online plural communities and their associated organizations emerged in greater abundance"

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLFbFmLLP3FsIzAc1FniNwNjI9iUxGFoGW - A YouTube series on writing in a flow-y manner.
• https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/99105