You already covered "favour the concrete over the abstract" but I do think "show, don't tell" can't be reiterated enough.
The biggest problem I find when editing other people's writing is the use of redundant assertions, e.g. "The Acme App is blazingly fast", when factual statements will do: "In the same time it took for CompetitorApp to load, the AcmeApp had already performed 2 qunitpleflops of foos"
A harmful side effect of the "tell" approach is the huge amount of time people spend thesaurus-hacking: trying to find different adjectives to say the same thing, over and over.
I know your question is about overall coherency and flow, but unfortunately many writers fail at the basic general rules, which makes it difficult to polish the body of writing as a whole.
For a practical step, I suggest writing the entirety of the piece without adjectives, and perhaps without concern for transitions. If the writing is nonsensicial or uninteresting in its barest form, then the writer should focus on better content. The style is easy to add later.
The biggest problem I find when editing other people's writing is the use of redundant assertions, e.g. "The Acme App is blazingly fast", when factual statements will do: "In the same time it took for CompetitorApp to load, the AcmeApp had already performed 2 qunitpleflops of foos"
A harmful side effect of the "tell" approach is the huge amount of time people spend thesaurus-hacking: trying to find different adjectives to say the same thing, over and over.
I know your question is about overall coherency and flow, but unfortunately many writers fail at the basic general rules, which makes it difficult to polish the body of writing as a whole.
For a practical step, I suggest writing the entirety of the piece without adjectives, and perhaps without concern for transitions. If the writing is nonsensicial or uninteresting in its barest form, then the writer should focus on better content. The style is easy to add later.