You're taking a well-deserved break from drafting your article. It's time for a solid binge of streaming content. But one series is too slow. Another has way too much going on at once. You need a show with a good balance of fast-paced material and slower, more rewarding pay-offs.

Pacing. It's how a story uses time. And how it persuades you to give more of your time to it. If it's well done, you won't notice how many times you let the next-episode countdown run down.

We all know, perhaps better than we would like to, that writing an article is a process that exists in time. But once the text is down on the page, we tend to think of it as a stable, static unit--something that exists in space, not in time. But like any story, academic writing is always experienced in time. And like any readers, scholarly readers respond to good pacing.

The easiest way to improve your pacing is to write like a reader: read your text out loud. Better yet, make someone else read it out loud while you listen. But for now, just read this:

Among the ways to lose a reader, overcomplicated syntax, without a doubt, is one of the most common; it, more often than not, is a reflection of how we, living in an extemporaneous spoken world, actually communicate, as our brains—albeit painfully—try to structure an argument.

Someone might not think twice if you said that in a conversation because there's so much more texture to spoken language. But put it in writing and they will happily put your article down and cite someone else instead. In writing, your readers have to anticipate all those pauses, asides, and accelerations themselves. It's your job to help them out.

Remember that your reader has never seen your sentences before. Structure them so there are fewer chances for a misfire, and you've already persuaded more of them to stick with you. But while places where readers will trip over themselves are easy to find and fix, there's a more subtle aspect to pacing your text, too.

Simple declarative sentences effectively express ideas. They are useful when laying out established knowledge. They are also useful for making strong assertions. They become tedious if they are too repetitive. They can be hard to build on. Some of your more speculative ideas might benefit from being couched in a sentence rhythm that's a little more fluid and that, without becoming overly complicated, communicates a little less certainty about what's going on. But don't rely on that. Lengthy sentences are a good way to lose not only the attention but the confidence of the reader. Short sentences snap readers to attention. They communicate authority. Long sentences tend to mimic speech and suggest that there is a more conversational, contingent aspect to what an author is trying to convey. Balance the two.

The same rule holds true on the paragraph level: Short paragraphs mean information is coming at a reader quickly. They don't give room for transitions.

Nor do they allow for contemplation.

They feel axiomatic. Structurally, they mimic a list.

Sentences and paragraphs have a structural rhythm, but your content has a rhythm, too. Laundry lists of evidence (quoted material, data) will pile up on top of a reader. They'll forget why they're reading. Break evidence up with commentary to let us know which parts of the evidence are important: what ideas do you want us to remember and carry forward? On the other hand, commentary without evidence has the same effect as long sentences that aren't broken up by shorter ones: your reader ends up in a spin cycle with nothing to hold onto. Here too, read it all aloud: evidence and commentary have subtly different voices. Make sure they, too, balance.

English prose in any genre thrives on variety. It is part of the aesthetic joy of academic reading just as much as it is of watching family dramas. But variety isn't an end in itself: that tension between expectation and novelty is another way of thinking about clarity and persuasion. Find the places in the text where you need strong ideas to land. Use them to bookend the places where you want to take the reader on more of a journey. Hearing the text out loud is the easiest way to know what’s what.