From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Don't give readers whiplash

Don't give readers whiplash

From the course: Ninja Writing: The Four Levels of Writing Mastery

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Don't give readers whiplash

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- Okay, so this concept is one that I learned when I was working at Bloomberg News. And it's a very useful one that stuck with me, which is, don't give readers whiplash. Now, what do I mean by that? It's, whiplash is when a reader is kind of turned in many different directions because you're saying things that are going in different directions within the same sentence. We used to get this with writing stock reports. We used to say this stock went up and this stock went down, and this one went up, and this one went down. And, the effect of reading something like that is that this went down, this went up, this went up, and you're getting whiplash, your head is turning to all different directions. So it's quite a useful thing to learn how to recognize when that's happening and to smooth that out so that it creates a better reading experience. It just means you've got many ideas going on that are going in different directions. They would tell us to focus on one idea at a time, and get…

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