Can you imagine if, in the middle of the night, your soft-spoken wife, husband or sibling suddenly speaks in a hard-edged voice that definitely could not be hers or his? You’ll no doubt be puzzled, shocked, probably thrown into a state of panic. This is because the totally unexpected is rarely welcome. It’s something that seriously violates the familiarity, sense of security and normal rhythm of everybody’s personal universe.
Readers experience this bewilderment when we make unannounced shifts in voice, tense, person and number in our writing. These shifts make prose exasperating and difficult to understand; they are, in fact, among the most formidable enemies of exposition. We thus should cultivate the art of avoiding them — and of spotting and eliminating them every time they creep into our prose.
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