There's a kind of checklist to help with this: when a story is falling short in some way, writers roll out these "rules" for what makes for good and bad prose. There are a bunch of these rulesets (think of #StrunkAndWhite's #ElementsOfStyle), including some genre-specific ones like the #TurkeyCityLexicon:

https://www.sfwa.org/2009/06/18/turkey-city-lexicon-a-primer-for-sf-workshops/

8/