Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. This course teaches scientists to become more effective writers, using practical examples and exercises. If the two sides of this simple table are reversed, it becomes much harder to read. More. Rather than achieving concision, such jargon will usually make your prose long-winded and even impenetrable. Undervaluing self-relevant research may be harmful to both researchers and psychology as a field. But for the very reason that writers tend to be consistent in making such choices, they can learn to improve their writing style; they can permanently reverse those habitual structural decisions that mislead or burden readers. Having begun by analyzing the structure of the prose, we were led eventually to reinvestigate the substance of the science. Seven scholars share some common negative experiences in academia that no one talks about. These revisions might differ significantly from one another in the way their structures indicate to the reader the various weights and balances to be given to the information. The stress position can change in size from sentence to sentence. We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions. It is relatively long, 42 words; but that turns out not to be the main cause of its burdensome complexity. This methodology of reader expectations is founded on the recognition that readers make many of their most important interpretive decisions about the substance of prose based on clues they receive from its structure. Indeed, little modifications can go a long way. In revising the example passage, we made certain decisions about what to omit and what to emphasize. We believe it does, and that it matters a great deal, for words are tools of science no less than numbers are. Is the functional significance of URF's still "elusive"? We have seen sentences of over 100 words that flow easily and persuasively toward their clearly demarcated destination. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. We never have to wander too far into a sentence without being told where we are and what former strands of discourse are being continued. As a concomitant function, the principles simultaneously offer the writer a fresh re-entry to the thought process that produced the science. The only way to be sure is to ask. Here is one way to incorporate it into the sentence structure: On the other hand, the intervening material might be a mere aside that diverts attention from more important ideas; in that case the writer should have deleted it, allowing the prose to drive more directly toward its significant point: Only the author could tell us which of these revisions more accurately reflects his intentions. insert missing information, Our examples of scientific writing have ranged from the merely cloudy to the virtually opaque; yet all of them could be made significantly more comprehensible by observing the following structural principles: None of these reader-expectation principles should be considered "rules." This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. Then again. The passivity of the second sentence does not by itself impair its quality; in fact, "Pollen is dispersed by bees" is the superior sentence if it appears in a paragraph that intends to tell us a continuing story about pollen. Thus a whole list, numbered and indented, can occupy the stress position of a sentence if it has been clearly announced as being all that remains of that sentence. We can see that most of our difficulty was owing not to any deficiency in our reading skills but rather to the author's lack of comprehension of our structural needs as readers. Information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is placed where most readers expect to find it. H��W]s�F�}ׯ�ڗ(U�/`RyX�v֩�[�����/ JZS-��u�����Nݺ��M��t��>}���ɫw��bs�8��A��'_���,ς¤QąI� 6��1���uc(n΅ic+�&����j����;Q\L��\�����0�$�}���i��Pʇ4�K�>4�-���鳴����{�y�����d�"˻.귣,-v6r���}��>2��� F��>ʙ8Nw�C~O��ג�?���I��}�IP���.W]��zj,�.&�ͬ��$5�&K�7�.�d��ݵ�0���T� {���i�Y����������`�;?��'.�Cd���+�$8��D����DX�´O�Ө���^�7��S����Q��O6�'w ���� ��7��0�8��? Science writing commonly relies on a further form of compression: replacing frequently used terms consisting of more than one word with an abbreviation, typically formed from the term’s initial letters. Although this information may provide some sense of comfort, it does little to answer the interpretive questions that need answering. Pollen's story at that moment is a passive one. If we search for repeated old information in hope of settling on a good candidate for several of the topic positions, we find all too much of it: egg extract, TFIIIA, oocyte extract, RNA polymerase III, 5S RNA, and transcription. The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. We can begin to revise the example by ensuring the following for each sentence: Once again, if our decisions concerning the relative values of specific information differ from yours, we can all blame the author, who failed to make his intentions apparent. We have argued that the substance of thought and the expression of thought are so inextricably intertwined that changes in either will affect the quality of the other. If you are writing about science for non-scientists, you can still rely on jargon to achieve compression, but you should at least let your reader know what any uncommon term means the first time around. Since some of these features may vary from subject to subject, it focuses on those principles and conventions that are common to most areas of science. Science courses rely increasingly on the citation-sequence system of referencing. The science of scientific writing. If writers can become consciously aware of these locations, they can better control the degrees of recognition and emphasis a reader will give to the various pieces of information being presented. Then one more time. Long sentences need not be difficult to read; they are only difficult to write. Course instructors, TAs, and journal editors may all take different positions on this question. At or near the end of the cretaceous period, groups such as dinosaurs, belemnites, rudist bivalves, ammonites, and many others went extinct. Look again at the first sentence of the passage cited above. Lab instructors in some disciplines still insist on passive voice (in past tense) throughout that section: in other words, they do not accept any active constructions, even if you avoid using “I” and “we.” But a growing number of courses have followed the lead of journals by accepting first-person active constructions even in the Methods section. @inproceedings{Gopen1990TheSO, title={The Science of Scientific Writing If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs}, author={George D. Gopen and J. When there are fewer stress positions in a sentence Here is one version of what we think the authors meant to say, with two additional sentences supplied from a knowledge of nucleic acid chemistry: Each sentence now proceeds logically from its predecessor. We have not sought to transform the passages into "plain English" for the use of the general public; we have neither decreased the jargon nor diluted the science. Revised: This mechanism will help us understand how cytomegaloviruses infect the brain. Our final example adds another major reader expectation to the list. Ask any ten people why this paragraph is hard to read, and nine are sure to mention the technical vocabulary; several will also suggest that it requires specialized background knowledge.
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