Have you ever read something and found yourself losing focus or losing track of the argument? Sometimes, overly-uniform writing can lull a reader into a sort of autopilot mode for paragraphs at a time, making them less likely to follow and remember your argument. As a writer, recognizing this quality in your own work can be challenging. Yet, finding strategies to identify and fix those sections is vital to helping readers maintain attention. Applying scholar Eric Hayot’s concept of ventilation to air out monotonous academic prose is one way to make your writing more engaging—and comprehensible—to your reader.

Whereas an unvaried text can induce drowsiness—much like a stuffy room with no airflow—a ventilated text brings “oxygen” back into your writing by introducing more moments of stimulating variety. Hayot describes several aspects of writing that you can vary to ventilate your text, including sentence length, diction, use of figurative language, or degrees of formality. 

Note: The kind of revision work in this exercise makes the most sense to do when you’re close to the finish line. It’s okay to have monotonous writing early on when your priority is to figure out what you’re saying. Having unventilated writing later on, when it’s something readers will be seeing, is what might pose a problem.

To liven up a section of your writing with ventilation, choose a particular form of monotony that is affecting your writing and do the following:

Step 1: Identify a section to ventilate. Read your text aloud to find a section or stretch that feels like it is very one-note. You might also ask someone from a different discipline or a friend outside of academia to read your work and tell you where they feel their attention drifting. 

Step 2: When you have a section to work with, try to identify what makes it monotonous—repetitive sentence structure? Unvaried word choice? Dry tone? Once you see the problem, decide on a way to address it. For instance, you might address repetitive sentence structure by using more dynamic syntax or address a dry tone by introducing a moment of humor.

Step 3: Now that you have a strategy in mind, read through your section again and highlight specific passages where you want to use it to break up the monotony.

Step 4: Rewrite the highlighted passages to ventilate them. Then, read the section aloud or ask someone else to read it to check how the revisions have changed the reader’s experience. If the section feels more dynamic, great! If not, try using a different strategy to address the form of monotony you chose at the start of the exercise.

Writer Gary Provost’s “This Sentence Has Five Words” is an excellent example of prose that is ventilated by varying sentence length and structure.

For more about introducing this particular kind of variety, see “Do Your Sentences All Sound the Same? Diversify Sentence Structure and Length.” For more about shaping your reader’s experience, see “How Much Do I Need to Explain? Finding Places to Condense and Expand,” “Will My Reader Know What’s Important? Mapping and Signposting as Tools to Navigate Between Claims,” “Am I Including the Right Amount of Contextual Information? A Promote-Demote Exercise,” and “Unsure of Reader Objections to Your Work? Strengthen Your Argument by Playing Devil’s Advocate.”