On making your text move dynamically

Compare these two texts, identical in almost everything except ... Which moves faster? Which is easier to read?

One is an excerpt from an article in "The Guardian." Another is my downgraded rewrite.

1.

It is 5.15am and I am walking down my street, feeling smug. The buildings are bathed in peachy dawn light. “Win the morning and you win the day,” suggests productivity guru Tim Ferriss. The prize is within my sights: an oat-milk latte, my reward for getting up ridiculously early.

The trains have not started running yet and the silence seems to magnify hitherto inaudible sounds. There is a mysterious squawk of gulls. I live in Camden, north-west London, many miles from the seaside. I have certainly never heard them here before.

2.

It is 5.15 am and I am walking down my street, feeling smug. The buildings are bathed in peachy dawn light. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss suggests that if you win the morning, you win the day. The prize, which is my reward for getting up ridiculously early, is an oat-milk latte, and it is within my sights. The trains have not started running yet and the silence seems to magnify hitherto inaudible sounds. There is a mysterious squawk of gulls, which I have never heard before as I live in Camden, north-west London, many miles from the seaside.

The first text is the original. The second text is a representation of what I call "a wall of text" -- no paragraphs and very long sentences with no interruptions.

The interruptions -- paragraphs, direct speech, dashes, to name a few -- stop the reader's mind from wandering. They make the text more dynamic and readable.

To try your hand at these and other tools of making your text more dynamic, you can join:

1️⃣ My workshop "Dynamic Writing: How to break a wall of text" https://t.me/irinalutsenko/731

2️⃣ My mini-course "Writing with The Guardian" https://t.me/irinalutsenko/715

These are my pet projects I only run in summer. Because the rest of the year is reserved for IELTS -- and you can't have these kinds of fun in IELTS.

💌 @iraluts