Conjunction Laziness: Peeling Off the 'Moreover' Duct Tape

For years, I thought starting every paragraph with "in addition," "on the other hand," or "moreover" made my writing flow smoothly. When I placed these decorative bridges between the words on my screen, I believed I was smoothly carrying the reader from one thought to the next. In reality, these conjunctions were nothing more than cheap duct tape trying to hold disjointed ideas together without any organic connection.

One day in our workshop, we tried completely stripping every transition word from a long article. Our goal was to streamline the prose, but the outcome was disastrous. The piece didn't just lose its rhythm; it fell apart completely. The ideas didn't generate one another; they were merely stacked in a list. This collapse revealed the underlying problem: transition words were band-aids concealing lazy construction. If there is no logical bridge between ideas, no conjunction can bridge the chasm. Indeed, eye-tracking studies confirm that readers frequently skip these long, predictable transitional phrases at the start of paragraphs, viewing them as unnecessary cognitive load. Readers didn't even see those words.

We tried simply deleting the conjunctions and leaving the sentences as they were, which failed because the prose turned robotic and choppy. Instead, we had to adopt a micro-tactical shift. We began applying the linguistic principle known as the "Known-New Contract." Under this rule, sentences should open with familiar (known) information and close with new information. In practice, this meant turning the final emphasis or object of Sentence A into the subject of Sentence B.

If you write, "Speed matters in content creation. Moreover, quality must not decline," that "moreover" is the weak link in the chain. When you reconstruct it as "The primary pressure in content creation is speed. When speed demands compromising on quality, the entire system collapses," the tail of the first sentence (speed) becomes the head of the second sentence (speed). An organic chain forms.

This is not an absolute dogma for every scenario. If you are deepening or expanding an idea, this "tail-to-head" interlocking works brilliantly. However, if you are pivoting to an entirely unrelated topic on a different axis, opening a clean subhead is far more honest than forcing an unnatural transition word into the gap. In academic or heavily technical prose, you may need explicit signposts to keep readers oriented, but in standard editorial writing, conjunctions are often just lazy shortcuts.

Here is the transferable rule to take back to your workshop: If you find yourself opening a sentence or paragraph with "Moreover," you ended the previous sentence in the wrong place—cut the conjunction and make the last word of the previous sentence your new subject.

Which transition word do you find yourself hiding behind most often in your writing?