Dominoes: ordering sentences in a reader-friendly way

Workshop review

In her very appropriately titled workshop, Maria Sherwood-Smith addressed a constant problematic issue for editors: how to reduce the burden on the reader by improving flow and coherence.

The use of the term “reader-friendly” is all-important, as, very often, we forget that the text we are working on will in fact have an audience and that it is our job as editors to ensure that the author’s message is transmitted in the most natural way possible, without requiring the reader to double back and re-read.

After a brief introduction to the concept of dominoes, that is, ordering the informational elements of the sentence neatly and in sequence, participants went off to rewrite lengthy sentences for textual fit in small breakout groups. This gave us the opportunity to decide which elements were key and to edit the sentence with the aim of improving readability.

In the second part of the workshop, Maria tackled the all-too-familiar problem of end weight. When key informational elements (verbs, adverbial phrases) fall at the end of the sentence, readers’ working memory retention is challenged, as they are required to wait before the meaning of the sentence becomes clear. An interesting additional strategy was that of using the much-maligned passive voice to flip word order around.

In both breakout sessions, the examples provided for participants to work on were well chosen from different fields. They were sufficiently long to encourage discussion, forcing us to think about the text in greater depth.

I found the domino approach both sensible and actionable. Very often, as editors, we are unable to see the wood for the trees. The straightforward strategies Maria proposed can help us to resolve our editing dilemmas.

Dominoes workshop image

Review by Thomas O’Boyle