hello and welcome to the writing process part three uh lecture uh titled keeping the reader's attention so far uh for the for the first part of this uh of this lecture series we talked about uh what kind of writer you are and you know where when and how you write and also the stages of writing and for the second part we um we we spoke a little bit about um writing in the active voice and saying saying more with less and by activating your voice uh you know your active voice that um uh you know that there's clarity in your writing and also it's it is more simplistic and easier to read and it does uh use less words now we're going to move into how we can keep the reader's attention

so reading is uh is not unlike uh watching a movie or listening to music that you know that you have to keep the readers attention if you want to get your point across or for them to also finish your work because a lot of times if they get confused or if they get fatigued they can easily put your book down or your manuscript or your paper or whatever and i think in today's society it's harder than ever uh because there is you know there's so much that we have to pay attention to and everything is in uh tid you know tidbits that uh sitting down and reading a 20-page paper is you know can be it can be very difficult and how we write it might make it even more difficult that writing goes back to the relationship much like the counseling relationship or many other relationships that we have with life such as in cooking we have the relationship between the chef and the patron at a dinner party between the host and the guests television even between the actors and the audience music the performer on stage and the audience uh and even you know within reading that you have the author and the reader and these are all relationships that we engage in uh quite a bit in life and uh um and and you know the author the relationship between the author and reader that uh you know this is a relationship that needs to be cultivated by the writer and ultimately it's the writer's responsibility to make their you know to make their their piece clear and easy to read and also to preserve the reader's attention span because if you think about it you know reading takes mental uh energy to do and we've only got so much mental energy in a day and uh you know we have to first of all motivate them to want to read more but second off we want to make it as easy as possible to convey our message from us to them through the written word so how do we do this uh you know we you know we we use only the words that we need to to get our point across we don't use excessive wording so you know once again we can take out passive voice we can flip passive voice to active voice and use uh less wording the whole meta writing idea you know thinking about your writing is that you pay very close attention to what you're writing in in in in very literal ways uh for example many researchers report the clinical efficacy and effectiveness of group counseling well if you think about this let's think about that sentence really carefully you might want to even pause the lecture at this moment just to you know read it a few times but you know what specifically is about you know this sentence that that you might be able to condense down uh and if you're thinking efficacy and effectiveness you're right because it's really the same thing efficacy and effectiveness really are saying the same things so if if you eliminated the one that makes the least sense here or is is the least descriptive then that then you're you're saving the reader from having to read two words the primary goal for the counseling profession is the assessment diagnosis and treat and treatment of mental and emotional disorders and individuals within the community wow what a what a sense that's a great sentence but how could we condense these down so the first sentence uh that that was in the last slide many researchers report the effectiveness of group counseling you take out efficacy and just leave effectiveness that the lard factor uh is has gone down 28 that we were able to eliminate 20 28 of the words of that sentence and only 72 percent is left uh which you know which is a a you know which is which is great for the reader because you know they're reading 28 less than they have to to get the point across uh for the second sentence you could write you could rewrite the whole thing to say professional counselors primary goal centers on assessing diagnosing and treating individuals with psychological disorders which gives you a large factor of 0.61 or you could even condense it even further to say a counselor's primary goal centers on helping people with psychosocial problems now this doesn't have anything to do with passive versus active voice this has to do with how can i convey my message with the fewest words possible and still get my message across so

so the thing is is that you know like you might be writing an active voice but you could even still condense it even further if you start to really look at your writing to think wow i could condense this even further and even further after a while you start doing that in revision process and it gets to be a lot of fun so also write about what you mean don't get caught up in professional jargon no bureaucratic vagueness uh prison is better than incarceration facility warehouse is better than storage facility therapy would be better than clinical treatment help is better than in intervention strategies there you know once again you're using less it's clearer and you don't have to read all that and and sift through it in in your mind's eye so paramedic method uh that can help with the tension we're adding one extra step so the the second uh lecture in the writing process writing process number part two talked about the first five uh uh steps to the paramedic method the sixth one is to read the passage out loud with feeling and and almost an exaggerated uh level of feeling and then ask someone else to maybe do that too and and we'll uh we'll do an exam i'll show you an example of that in a little bit so let's get to voice and rhythm voice and rhythm is is really uh uh that's going to be important in the writing process okay so we've already talked about active voice we don't need to talk about it anymore we need to talk about rhythm rhythm is important and not just music but in writing writing it gives life to your writing it if you can find the rhythm to your writing then on a subconscious level you can help the reader stay interested and in time with your writing rhythm now it's going to be subjected with everybody and you have to find your own rhythm and just you have to you have to discover it and maybe even adjust it if it's uh if it's a rhythmic but you have to figure out what your rhythm is so we have rhythm and then we also have flow uh and flow uh you know uh specifically using the funnel method uh will help achieve flow uh uh within within uh let's say your literature review within your writing uh you always want to start very broad in what your topic is and then quickly narrow down specifically to what you're proposing within your study or what you really want to talk about so you you funnel within paragraphs and also you funnel between paragraphs um you don't want to write too broad too too much and you don't want to like write and you don't want to write too narrow too much it has to be a balance so an example of a funnel might be let's say you want to talk about intervention strategies to lessen students anxieties in graduate school let's say that's that's where you want to get to but you can't get you can't start right there you have to start more broadly you have to start back where it when it all began and you have to start maybe such as like when uh uh describing how graduate school in general is stressful and then you want to funnel down a little bit more to talk about how doctoral programs specifically are stressful and you're going to funnel out uh you're going to funnel out pressures of high school and undergraduate you know and you've already funneled that out when you started general uh you know generally by speaking that you know that uh graduate school is stressful but you're also by talking about doctoral programs are specifically stressful you're funneling out master's level students and then you funnel down a little bit further to talk about what problems doctoral students encounter and uh and then you might go down a little bit further to look at intervention strategies to lessen student anxieties and doctor school and in doctoral school now the thing is is the more you funnel down into the specific the more you're funneling out and ruling out other topics for discussion and that's how paper should go so here's the second part of this of this uh of this lit review you would start out a whole nother uh a whole other topic during the slit review with wellness you know defining and describing wellness in general and then you might funnel down into your chosen wellness theory and your model and that's going to funnel out all other wellness theories and models then you're going to funnel down even further and get more specific to look at wellness studies that look specifically a graduate students and that's going to funnel out wellness studies looking at other populations then you're going to funnel down drill down even deeper to wellness studies looking specifically at doc students and and that's going to funnel out wellness studies looking at other populations and then you might come to a research problem because hey you know that you know that there's a gap in the literature and and then you might have the goals of the study you know research questions and hypotheses that you know that that is going to come from uh you know from your funneling so that's how you follow and start thinking about that you know you funnel between paragraphs you funnel within a paragraph but then you also funnel between paragraphs but the entire literature review the entire paper should be funneling down to to get to your main point in terms of what you really want to talk about okay let's find your rhythm uh you can find your rhythm uh using the last two steps of the paramedic paramedic method so we've already talked about the first six and and just recently we've we've added on you know re read the passage out loud with feeling and and and that's going to help find your rhythm but you also want to write out each sentence on a blank piece of paper marking off its basic rhythmic units and then mark off uh off sentence links with with slashes as well um and we're i'm going to get into a a an example of that in a bit so in scientific writing also with our rhythm we don't want to we don't want things to get in the way of of our rhythm and and the attention to the reader so alliteration is something that can take uh take away the reader's attention of the message that you want to convey and and they're only focusing on the words of the story so uh alliteration an example is conflict competition and chaos during combat can interfere with the soldiers concentration well that's fun but that's not scientific we don't want to be distracted by by alliteration we want to write once again with precision with conciseness and with clarity and with simplicity now also you might be a rhythmic i've known people that have a very a rhythmic writing style and that's when people have the same sentence structure for each sentence now to have a good rhythm in your writing you need to mix it up you need to have short sentences long sentences medium sentences and typically i've noticed that people who have a combination of all of these use them in some kind of formulaic fashion within their within their paragraphs what they might start off with a long sentence then move to a short one then move that to a medium size within and then end it with a long sentence something like that now here's an example uh of of different things that you can do uh reading something with feeling you might want to read the first couple of of of set of sentences here and read it with an exaggerated sense of feeling such as this but wellness like many other human attributes changes as individuals move across the lifespan specifically individuals perceptions and definition of definition of wellness evolves over time for instance would an adolescent and a midlifer perceive physical or social wellness the same way so you would what you do is you just keep reading it that way and read it with feeling to see does it have a sense of rhythm to it also what you would do is you could put slashes where there are natural breaks within the sentences to see where do the natural breaks work and does that create a sense of rhythm and the last one is to count your sentence structure or to count how many words are in each sentence so what i did is i went back to this paragraph and i counted all of the words of each sentence and i put it on a graph and i don't know why this says series it should say sentence sentence one two three four all the way to eight so sentence one is about fourteen words sentence two drops down to ten sentence three goes up to about 16 words sentence 4 moves up to 25 words feels like it's building to a climax sentence 5 moves up to 30 words sentence 6 climaxes at 37 words and then oops and then sentence seven drops to about 15 words and then it concludes with sentence eight at about 19 words so that is my rhythm that is my rhythm put out on a graph now you can graph you you know you can graph a a paragraph or two of things that you've written in the past to see what does your rhythm look like on a graph how does your rhythm sound when you read it out loud with passion and an exaggeration how does your rhythm look when you put slashes at all of the natural breaks within a sentence in between sentences and also how does your flow look does your first sentence uh you know it uh you know uh transition to the second sentence does the second sentence transition to the third third to the fourth fourth to the fifth and when you look at the last sentence in a paragraph in the fifth sentence does does the first sentence is is it getting you to the place that you you wanted to get from your first sentence and then how do the paragraphs flow together how does your first paragraph flow into your second how does your second flow into your third where are you taking the reader is there a natural progression okay well this is the conclusion for rhythm and writing and also flow and funneling i hope it's been helpful to you uh and uh have a good day today