Wikipedia:Reading flow
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Essay on the readability of articles
Essay on editing Wikipedia
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 or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.
Flow in a nutshell: Reduce the burden on the reader by writing well. Remember to read and review your own writing.
When writing an article, it is important to remember and respect the reader's ability to read uninterrupted. Interruptions cause cognitive load: when people are distracted by how the text was written, it becomes harder for them to pay attention to the information in the text. Poorly written text will be seen by readers as confusing, unorganized, or choppy.
A good way to check for flow is reading the article out-loud. The best advice for finding flow issues is to sleep on it. However, it is not required to find flow that is worse than it could be in any given mental state.
Causes
[edit ]- Badly written semantics. While the text technically includes all of the information that should be there, it still has ambiguity.
- Inconsistent writing style or terminology.
- Inappropriate or gratuitous use of jargon.
- Having to re-interpret the sentence or skip words due to them being far too close to each other.
- Inconsistent text sequencing [1]
- Wrong grammar in general is something that detracts from flow.
- Repetitive sentence structures.
Examples
[edit ]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"
Alexithymia
[edit ]The issue with the incorrect version is unidiomatic. The correct version fixes that by replacing some of the words such as "for [...] to be" with "proposed removing [...] from."
- Incorrect: "[...]where they proposed for IMP to be removed from the definition. In the same paper, they suggested that alexithymia should compose of DIF, DDF, and EOT, as each of these three are specific"
- Correct: "[...] here they proposed removing IMP from the definition. In the same paper, they suggested that alexithymia should consist of DIF, DDF, and EOT, as all three are specific"
Automatically generated list
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This table is generated by querying the database replica by a bot.
Edits made within the table area will be removed on the next update!
∑ 50 items | Query runtime: 2.09 s | Last updated: 20:41, 17 November 2025 (UTC) End of auto-generated report.
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References
[edit ]See also
[edit ]- https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLFbFmLLP3FsIzAc1FniNwNjI9iUxGFoGW - A YouTube series on writing in a flow-y manner.
- https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/99105