In her study of successful writing academics, Helen Sword identified some of the characteristics for writing that writers keep in mind as they work, things like “concision,” “structure,” “voice,” “identity,” “clarity,” “vocabulary,” “agency,” “audience,” and “telling a story.”5 When these expert writers think about the sentences themselves they consider not grammar—a word we associate with correctness—but “syntax,” the arrangement of words in the expression of an idea.
