TheScienceOfScientificWriting

The Science of Scientific Writing (G. Gopen and J. Swan)

Protocols

• Readers do not simply read; they interpret
• Since we read left to right, we prefer the context on the left, where it can more effectively familiarize the reader.
• Readers expect a grammatical subject to be followed immediately by the verb. Anything of length that intervenes between subject and verb is read as an interruption, and therefore as something of lesser importance.
• Without the verb, we do not know what the subject is doing, or what the sentence is all about. As a result, the reader focuses attention on the arrival of the verb and resists recognizing anything in the interrupting material as being of primary importance.
• Each unit of discourse, no matter what the size, is expected to serve a single function, to make a single point. In the case of a sentence, the point is expected to appear in a specific place reserved for emphasis.
• Readers naturally emphasize the material that arrives at the end of a sentence. We refer to that location as a "stress position". If a writer is consciously aware of this tendency, she can arrange for the emphatic information to appear at the moment the reader is naturally exerting the greatest reading emphasis.
• Beginning with the exciting material and ending with a lack of luster often leaves us disappointed and destroys our sense of momentum. We do not start with strawberry shortcake and work our way up to the broccoli.
• The stress position coincides with the moment of syntactic closure. A reader has reached the beginning of the stress position when she knows there is nothing left in the clause or sentence but the material presently being read.
• We have three rhetorical principles based on reader expectations
  1. grammatical subjects should be followed as soon as possible by their verbs.
  2. every unit of discourse, no matter the size, should serve a single function or make a single point
  3. information intended to be emphasized should appear at points of syntactic closure.
• A sentence is too long when it has more viable candidates for stress positions than there are stress positions available. Without the stress positions locational clue that its material is intended to be emphasized, readers are left too much to their own devices in deciding just what else in a sentence might be considered important.
• "Bees disperse pollen" and "Pollen is dispersed by bees" are two different by equally respectable sentences about the same facts. The first tells us something about bees; the second tells us something about pollen. The passivity of the second sentence does no 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 of pollen. Pollen's story at that moment is a passive one.
• Writing that continually begins sentences with new information and ends with old information forbids both the sense of comfort and orientation at the start and the sense of fulfilling arrival at the end. It misleads the reader as to whose story is being told; it burdens the reader with new information that must be carried further into the sentence before it can be connected to the discussion; and it creates ambiguity as to which material the writer intended the reader to emphasize.
• The misplacement of old and new information turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing. Most writers produce prose linearly (from left to right) and through time. As they begin to formulate a sentence, often their primary anxiety is to capture the important new thought before it escapes. Quite naturally they rush to record that new information on paper, after which they can produce at their leisure the contextualizing material that links back to the previous discourse. Writers who do this consistently are attending more to their own need for unburdening themselves of their information than to the readers need for receiving the material.
• Put in the topic position old information that links backward, but in the stress position the new information that you want the reader to emphasize.
• When old information does not appear at all in a sentence, whether in the topic position or elsewhere, readers are left to construct the logical linkage by themselves. Often this happens when connections are so clear in the writers mind that they seem unnecessary to state.
• Readers expect the action of a sentence to be articulated by the verb.