Carnegie Mellon University

Improving Flow with the Known-New Contract

Download PDF Handout: Making Complex Writing Intelligible with the Known-New Contract

Watch Video: Improving the Flow of Your Writing

If you write long, complex sentences, you may have tried several methods to make them more concise, perhaps condensing phrases, deleting prepositions, or even purging entire paragraphs. These methods can be useful, but the clarity of your writing also depends on how your sentences sound together rather than in isolation. Luckily, this logical flow between sentences is easier to assemble with the help of a research-backed tool: the known-new contract.

With these resources, you’ll learn the difference between the topic and stress positions of the sentence, how to rewrite disorderly sentences using the known-new contract, and how to adapt the known-new contract to multiple types of sentences.

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