George D. Gopen is associate professor of English and Director of Writing Programs at Duke University. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Judith A. Swan teaches scientific writing at Princeton University. Her Ph.D., which is in biochemistry, was earned at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Address for Gopen: 307 Allen Building, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706
Science is often hard to
read. Most people assume that its difficulties are born out of
necessity, out of the extreme complexity of scientific concepts, data
and analysis. We argue here that complexity of thought need not lead
to impenetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of
rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communication
without oversimplifying scientific issues. The results are
substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the quality of writing
actually improves the quality of thought.
The fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not the mere
presentation of information and thought, but rather its actual
communication. It does not matter how pleased an author might be to
have converted all the right data into sentences and paragraphs; it
matters only whether a large majority of the reading audience
accurately perceives what the author had in mind. Therefore, in order
to understand how best to improve writing, we would do well to
understand better how readers go about reading. Such an understanding
has recently become available through work done in the fields of
rhetoric, linguistics and cognitive psychology. It has helped to
produce a methodology based on the concept of reader expectations.
Readers do not simply read; they interpret. Any piece of prose,
no matter how short, may "mean" in 10 (or more) different
ways to 10 different readers. 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.
This interplay between substance and structure can be demonstrated
by something as basic as a simple table. Let us say that in tracking
the temperature of a liquid over a period of time, an investigator
takes measurements every three minutes and records a list of
temperatures. Those data could be presented by a number of written
structures. Here are two possibilities:
Precisely the same information appears in both formats, yet most
readers find the second easier to interpret. It may be that the very
familiarity of the tabular structure makes it easier to use. But,
more significantly, the structure of the second table provides the
reader with an easily perceived context (time) in which the
significant piece of information (temperature) can be interpreted.
The contextual material appears on the left in a pattern that produces
an expectation of regularity; the interesting results appear on the
right in a less obvious pattern, the discovery of which is the point
of the table.
If the two sides of this simple table are reversed, it becomes
much harder to read.
Since we read from left to right, we prefer the context on the
left, where it can more effectively familiarize the reader. We prefer
the new, important information on the right, since its job is to
intrigue the reader.
Information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is
placed where most readers expect to find it. These needs and
expectations of readers affect the interpretation not only of tables
and illustrations but also of prose itself. Readers have relatively
fixed expectations about where in the structure of prose they will
encounter particular items of its substance. 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. Good writers are intuitively
aware of these expectations; that is why their prose has what we call
"shape."
This underlying concept of reader expectation is perhaps most
immediately evident at the level of the largest units of discourse.
(A unit of discourse is defined as anything with a beginning and an
end: a clause, a sentence, a section, an article, etc.) A research
article, for example, is generally divided into recognizable sections,
sometimes labeled Introduction, Experimental Methods, Results and
Discussion. When the sections are confused--when too much
experimental detail is found in the Results section, or when
discussion and results intermingle--readers are often equally
confused. In smaller units of discourse the functional divisions are
not so explicitly labeled, but readers have definite expectations all
the same, and they search for certain information in particular
places. If these structural expectations are continually violated,
readers are forced to divert energy from understanding the content of
a passage to unraveling its structure. As the complexity of the
context increases moderately, the possibility of misinterpretation or
noninterpretation increases dramatically.
We present here some results of applying this methodology to
research reports in the scientific literature. We have taken several
passages from research articles (either published or accepted for
publication) and have suggested ways of rewriting them by applying
principles derived from the study of reader expectations. 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. We have striven not for simplification but for
clarification.
Here is our first example of scientific prose, in its original
form:
[*The full paragraph includes one more sentence:
"Support for such functional identification of the URF products has
come from the finding that the purified rotenone-sensitive NADH
dehydrogenase from Neurospora crassa contains several subunits
synthesized within the mitochondria, and from the observation that the
stopper mutant of Neurospora crassa, whose mtDNA lacks two
genes homologous to URF2 and URF3, has no functional complex I." We
have omitted this sentence both because the passage is long enough as
is and because it raises no additional structural issues.]
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. Those
problems turn out to be only a small part of the difficulty. Here is
the passage again, with the difficult words temporarily lifted:
It may now be easier to survive the journey through the prose, but
the passage is still difficult. Any number of questions present
themselves: What has the first sentence of the passage to do with the
last sentence? Does the third sentence contradict what we have been
told in the second sentence? Is the functional significance of URF's
still "elusive"? Will this passage lead us to further discussion about
URF's, or about Complex I, or both?
Knowing a little about the subject matter does not clear up
all the confusion. The intended audience of this passage would
probably possess at least two items of essential technical
information: first, "URF" stands for "Uninterrupted Reading Frame,"
which describes a segment of DNA organized in such a way that it could
encode a protein, although no such protein product has yet been
identified; second, both APTase and NADH oxido-reductase are enzyme
complexes central to energy metabolism. Although this information may
provide some sense of comfort, it does little to answer the
interpretive questions that need answering. It seems the reader is
hindered by more than just the scientific jargon.
To get at the problem, we need to articulate something about how
readers go about reading. We proceed to the first of several reader
expectations.
Look again at the first sentence of the passage cited above. It
is relatively long, 42 words; but that turns out not to be the main
cause of its burdensome complexity. Long sentences need not be
difficult to read; they are only difficult to write. We have seen
sentences of over 100 words that flow easily and persuasively toward
their clearly demarcated destination. Those well-wrought serpents all
had something in common: Their structure presented information to
readers in the order the readers needed and expected it.
The first sentence of our example passage does just the opposite:
it burdens and obstructs the reader, because of an all-too-common
structural defect. Note that the grammatical subject ("the smallest")
is separated from its verb ("has been identified") by 23 words, more
than half the sentence. 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.
The reader's expectation stems from a pressing need for syntactic
resolution, fulfilled only by the arrival of the verb. 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. The longer the
interruption lasts, the more likely it becomes that the "interruptive"
material actually contains important information; but its structural
location will continue to brand it as merely interruptive.
Unfortunately, the reader will not discover its true value until too
lateùuntil the sentence has ended without having produced anything
of much value outside of that subject-verb interruption.
In this first sentence of the paragraph, the relative importance
of the intervening material is difficult to evaluate. The material
might conceivably be quite significant, in which case the writer
should have positioned it to reveal that importance. 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.
These revisions lead us to a second set of reader expectations.
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.
It is a linguistic commonplace that 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. As a result, the chances greatly increase that reader and
writer will perceive the same material as being worthy of primary
emphasis. The very structure of the sentence thus helps persuade the
reader of the relative values of the sentence's contents.
The inclination to direct more energy to that which arrives last
in a sentence seems to correspond to the way we work at tasks through
time. We tend to take something like a "mental breath" as we begin to
read each new sentence, thereby summoning the tension with which we
pay attention to the unfolding of the syntax. As we recognize that
the sentence is drawing toward its conclusion, we begin to exhale that
mental breath. The exhalation produces a sense of emphasis.
Moreover, we delight in being rewarded at the end of a labor with
something that makes the ongoing effort worthwhile. 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
the strawberry shortcake and work our way up to the broccoli.
When the writer puts the emphatic material of a sentence in any
place other than the stress position, one of two things can happen;
both are bad. First, the reader might find the stress position
occupied by material that clearly is not worthy of emphasis. In this
case, the reader must discern, without any additional structural clue,
what else in the sentence may be the most likely candidate for
emphasis. There are no secondary structural indications to fall back
upon. In sentences that are long, dense or sophisticated, chances soar
that the reader will not interpret the prose precisely as the writer
intended. The second possibility is even worse: The reader may find
the stress position occupied by something that does appear capable of
receiving emphasis, even though the writer did not intend to give it
any stress. In that case, the reader is highly likely to emphasize
this imposter material, and the writer will have lost an important
opportunity to influence the reader's interpretive process.
The stress position can change in size from sentence to sentence.
Sometimes it consists of a single word; sometimes it extends to
several lines. The definitive factor is this: 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.
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. Each member of that list, in turn, may
have its own internal stress position, since each member may produce
its own syntactic closure.
Within a sentence, secondary stress positions can be formed by the
appearance of a properly used colon or semicolon; by grammatical
convention, the material preceding these punctuation marks must be
able to stand by itself as a complete sentence. Thus, sentences can
be extended effortlessly to dozens of words, as long as there is a
medial syntactic closure for every piece of new, stress-worthy
information along the way. One of our revisions of the initial
sentence can serve as an example:
By using a semicolon, we created a second stress position to
accommodate a second piece of information that seemed to require
emphasis.
We now have three rhetorical principles based on reader
expectations: First, grammatical subjects should be followed as soon
as possible by their verbs; second, every unit of discourse, no matter
the size, should serve a single function or make a single point; and,
third, information intended to be emphasized should appear at points
of syntactic closure. Using these principles, we can begin to unravel
the problems of our example prose.
Note the subject-verb separation in the 62-word third sentence of
the original passage:
After encountering the subject ("experiments"), the reader must
wade through 27 words (including three hyphenated compound words, a
parenthetical interruption and an "as well as" phrase) before
alighting on the highly uninformative and disappointingly
anticlimactic verb ("have indicated"). Without a moment to recover,
the reader is handed a "that" clause in which the new subject ("six
human URF's") is separated from its verb ("encode") by yet another 20
words.
If we applied the three principles we have developed to the rest
of the sentences of the example, we could generate a great many
revised versions of each. 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. Had
the author placed all stress-worthy material in stress positions, we
as a reading community would have been far more likely to interpret
these sentences uniformly.
We couch this discussion in terms of "likelihood" because we
believe that meaning is not inherent in discourse by itself; "meaning"
requires the combined participation of text and reader. All sentences
are infinitely interpretable, given an infinite number of
interpreters. As communities of readers, however, we tend to work out
tacit agreements as to what kinds of meaning are most likely to be
extracted from certain articulations. 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. Such success will follow from
authors becoming more consciously aware of the various reader
expectations presented here.
Here is one set of revisionary decisions we made for the example:
Sheer length was neither the problem nor the solution. The
revised version is not noticeably shorter than the original;
nevertheless, it is significantly easier to interpret. We have indeed
deleted certain words, but not on the basis of wordiness or excess
length. (See especially the last sentence of our revision.)
When is a sentence too long? The creators of readability formulas
would have us believe there exists some fixed number of words (the
favorite is 29) past which a sentence is too hard to read. We
disagree. We have seen 10-word sentences that are virtually
impenetrable and, as we mentioned above, 100-word sentences that flow
effortlessly to their points of resolution. In place of the
word-limit concept, we offer the following definition: A sentence is
too long when it has more viable candidates for stress positions than
there are stress positions available. Without the stress position's
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.
In revising the example passage, we made certain decisions about
what to omit and what to emphasize. We put subjects and verbs
together to lessen the reader's syntactic burdens; we put the material
we believed worthy of emphasis in stress positions; and we discarded
material for which we could not discern significant connections. In
doing so, we have produced a clearer passage--but not one that
necessarily reflects the author's intentions; it reflects only our
interpretation of the author's intentions. The more problematic the
structure, the less likely it becomes that a grand majority of readers
will perceive the discourse in exactly the way the author intended.
It is probable that many of our readers--and perhaps even the
authors--will disagree with some of our choices. If so, that
disagreement underscores our point: The original failed to communicate
its ideas and their connections clearly. If we happened to have
interpreted the passage as you did, then we can make a different
point: No one should have to work as hard as we did to unearth the
content of a single passage of this length.
To summarize the principles connected with the stress position, we
have the proverbial wisdom, "Save the best for last." To summarize
the principles connected with the other end of the sentence, which we
will call the topic position, we have its proverbial contradiction,
"First things first." In the stress position the reader needs and
expects closure and fulfillment; in the topic position the reader
needs and expects perspective and context. With so much of reading
comprehension affected by what shows up in the topic position, it
behooves a writer to control what appears at the beginning of
sentences with great care.
The information that begins a sentence establishes for the reader
a perspective for viewing the sentence as a unit: Readers expect a
unit of discourse to be a story about whoever shows up first. "Bees
disperse pollen" and "Pollen is dispersed by bees" are two different
but 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 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. Pollen's story at that moment is a
passive one.
Readers also expect the material occupying the topic position to
provide them with linkage (looking backward) and context (looking
forward). The information in the topic position prepares the reader
for upcoming material by connecting it backward to the previous
discussion. Although linkage and context can derive from several
sources, they stem primarily from material that the reader has already
encountered within this particular piece of discourse. We refer to
this familiar, previously introduced material as "old information."
Conversely, material making its first appearance in a discourse is
"new information." When new information is important enough to
receive emphasis, it functions best in the stress position.
When old information consistently arrives in the topic position,
it helps readers to construct the logical flow of the argument: It
focuses attention on one particular strand of the discussion, both
harkening backward and leaning forward. In contrast, if the topic
position is constantly occupied by material that fails to establish
linkage and context, readers will have difficulty perceiving both the
connection to the previous sentence and the projected role of the new
sentence in the development of the paragraph as a whole.
Here is a second example of scientific prose that we shall attempt
to improve in subsequent discussion:
This is the kind of passage that in subtle ways can make readers
feel badly about themselves. The individual sentences give the
impression of being intelligently fashioned: They are not especially
long or convoluted; their vocabulary is appropriately professional but
not beyond the ken of educated general readers; and they are free of
grammatical and dictional errors. On first reading, however, many of
us arrive at the paragraph's end without a clear sense of where we
have been or where we are going. When that happens, we tend to berate
ourselves for not having paid close enough attention. In reality, the
fault lies not with us, but with the author.
We can distill the problem by looking closely at the information
in each sentence's topic position:
Much of this information is making its first appearance in this
paragraph--in precisely the spot where the reader looks for old,
familiar information. As a result, the focus of the story constantly
shifts. Given just the material in the topic positions, no two
readers would be likely to construct exactly the same story for the
paragraph as a whole.
If we try to piece together the relationship of each sentence to
its neighbors, we notice that certain bits of old information keep
reappearing. We hear a good deal about the recurrence time between
earthquakes: The first sentence introduces the concept of nonrandom
intervals between earthquakes; the second sentence tells us that
recurrence rates due to the movement of tectonic plates are more or
less uniform; the third sentence adds that the recurrence rates of
major earthquakes should also be somewhat predictable; the fourth
sentence adds that recurrence rates vary with some conditions; the
fifth sentence adds information about one particular variation; the
sixth sentence adds a recurrence-rate example from California; and the
last sentence tells us something about how recurrence rates can be
described statistically. This refrain of "recurrence intervals"
constitutes the major string of old information in the paragraph.
Unfortunately, it rarely appears at the beginning of sentences, where
it would help us maintain our focus on its continuing story.
In reading, as in most experiences, we appreciate the opportunity
to become familiar with a new environment before having to function in
it. 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. All of these distractions require that readers expend a
disproportionate amount of energy to unravel the structure of the
prose, leaving less energy available for perceiving content.
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. Here first is a list of
what we perceived to be the new, emphatic material in each sentence:
Now, based on these assumptions about what deserves stress, here
is our proposed revision:
Many problems that had existed in the original have now surfaced
for the first time. Is the reason earthquakes do not occur at random
intervals stated in the first sentence or in the second? Are the
suggested choices of "however," "indeed," and "for example" the right
ones to express the connections at those points? (All these
connections were left unarticulated in the original paragraph.) If
"for example" is an inaccurate transitional phrase, then exactly how
does the San Andreas fault example connect to ruptures that "vary by a
factor of 2"? Is the author arguing that recurrence rates must vary
because fault movements often vary? Or is the author preparing us for
a discussion of how in spite of such variance we might still be able
to predict earthquakes? This last question remains unanswered because
the final sentence leaves behind earthquakes that recur at variable
intervals and switches instead to earthquakes that recur
regularly. Given that this is the first paragraph of the article,
which type of earthquake will the article most likely proceed to
discuss? In sum, we are now aware of how much the paragraph had not
communicated to us on first reading. 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.
In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information
turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing
today. The source of the problem is not hard to discover: 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 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 reader's need for
receiving the material. The methodology of reader expectations
articulates the reader's needs explicitly, thereby making writers
consciously aware of structural problems and ways to solve them.
A note of clarification: Many people hearing this structural
advice tend to oversimplify it to the following rule: "Put the old
information in the topic position and the new information in the
stress position." No such rule is possible. Since by definition all
information is either old or new, the space between the topic position
and the stress position must also be filled with old and new
information. Therefore the principle (not rule) should be stated as
follows: "Put in the topic position the old information that links
backward; put in the stress position the new information 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 the
connections are so clear in the writer's mind that they seem
unnecessary to state; at those moments, writers underestimate the
difficulties and ambiguities inherent in the reading process. Our
third example attempts to demonstrate how paying attention to the
placement of old and new information can reveal where a writer has
neglected to articulate essential connections.
Although part of the difficulty of reading this passage may stem
from its abundance of specialized technical terms, a great deal more
of the difficulty can be attributed to its structural problems. These
problems are now familiar: We are not sure at all times whose story is
being told; in the first sentence the subject and verb are widely
separated; the second sentence has only one stress position but two or
three pieces of information that are probably worthy of
emphasis--"solubility ...solvents," "prevent... from forming
hydrogen bonds" and perhaps "triisopropylsilyl groups." These
perceptions suggest the following revision tactics:
Here is a partial revision based on these decisions:
The outlines of the experiment are now becoming visible, but there
is still a major logical gap. After reading the second sentence, we
expect to hear more about the two effects that were important enough
to merit placement in its stress position. Our expectations are
frustrated, however, when those effects are not mentioned in the next
sentence: "From isoperibolic titration measurements, the enthalpy of
dC:dG base pair formation is -6.65˜0.32 kcal/mol." The authors
have neglected to explain the relationship between the derivatization
they performed (in the second sentence) and the measurements they made
(in the third sentence). Ironically, that is the point they most
wished to make here.
At this juncture, particularly astute readers who are chemists
might draw upon their specialized knowledge, silently supplying the
missing connection. Other readers are left in the dark. 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
never have to wander too far into a sentence without being told where
we are and what former strands of discourse are being continued. And
the "measurements" of the last sentence has now become old
information, reaching back to the "measured directly" of the preceding
sentence. (It also fulfills the promise of the "we have directly
measured" with which the paragraph began.) By following our knowledge
of reader expectations, we have been able to spot discontinuities, to
suggest strategies for bridging gaps, and to rearrange the structure
of the prose, thereby increasing the accessibility of the scientific
content.
Our final example adds another major reader expectation to the
list.
The barriers to comprehension in this passage are so many that it
may appear difficult to know where to start revising. Fortunately,
it does not matter where we start, since attending to any one
structural problem eventually leads us to all the others.
We can spot one source of difficulty by looking at the topic
positions of the sentences: We cannot tell whose story the passage is.
The story's focus (that is, the occupant of the topic position)
changes in every sentence. 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. All of
these reappear at various points, but none announces itself clearly as
our primary focus. It appears that the passage is trying to tell
several stories simultaneously, allowing none to dominate.
We are unable to decide among these stories because the author has
not told us what to do with all this information. We know who the
players are, but we are ignorant of the actions they are presumed to
perform. This violates yet another important reader expectation:
Readers expect the action of a sentence to be articulated by the verb.
Here is a list of the verbs in the example paragraph:
The list gives us too few clues as to what actions actually take
place in the passage. If the actions are not to be found in the
verbs, then we as readers have no secondary structural clues for where
to locate them. Each of us has to make a personal interpretive guess;
the writer no longer controls the reader's interpretive act.
Worse still, in this passage the important actions never appear.
Based on our best understanding of this material, the verbs that
connect these players are "limit" and "inhibit." If we express those
actions as verbs and place the most frequently occurring
information--"egg extract" and "TFIIIA"--in the topic position
whenever possible,* we can generate the following revision:
[*We have chosen these two pieces of old information
as the controlling contexts for the passage. That choice was neither
arbitrary nor born of logical necessity; it was simply an act of
interpretation. All readers make exactly that kind of choice in the
reading of every sentence. The fewer the structural clues to
interpretation given by the author, the more variable the resulting
interpretations will tend to be.]
As a story about "egg extract," this passage still leaves
something to be desired. But at least now we can recognize that the
author has not explained the connection between "limit" and "inhibit."
This unarticulated connection seems to us to contain both of her
hypotheses: First, that the limitation on transcription is caused by
an inhibitor of TFIIIA present in the egg extract; and, second, that
the action of that inhibitor can be detected by adding the egg extract
to the oocyte extract and examining the effects on transcription. As
critical scientific readers, we would like to concentrate our energy
on whether the experiments prove the hypotheses. We cannot begin to
do so if we are left in doubt as to what those hypotheses might
be--and if we are using most of our energy to discern the structure
of the prose rather than its substance.
We began this article by arguing that complex thoughts expressed
in impenetrable prose can be rendered accessible and clear without
minimizing any of their complexity. 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." Slavish adherence to them will succeed no better than has
slavish adherence to avoiding split infinitives or to using the active
voice instead of the passive. There can be no fixed algorithm for
good writing, for two reasons. First, too many reader expectations
are functioning at any given moment for structural decisions to remain
clear and easily activated. Second, any reader expectation can be
violated to good effect. Our best stylists turn out to be our most
skillful violators; but in order to carry this off, they must fulfill
expectations most of the time, causing the violations to be perceived
as exceptional moments, worthy of note.
A writer's personal style is the sum of all the structural choices
that person tends to make when facing the challenges of creating
discourse. Writers who fail to put new information in the stress
position of many sentences in one document are likely to repeat that
unhelpful structural pattern in all other documents. 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.
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. Note that only the first of our
examples (the paragraph about URF's) could be revised on the basis of
the methodology to reveal a nearly finished passage. In all the other
examples, revision revealed existing conceptual gaps and other
problems that had been submerged in the originals by dysfunctional
structures. Filling the gaps required the addition of extra material.
In revising each of these examples, we arrived at a point where we
could proceed no further without either supplying connections between
ideas or eliminating some existing material altogether. (Writers who
use reader-expectation principles on their own prose will not have to
conjecture or infer; they know what the prose is intended to convey.)
Having begun by analyzing the structure of the prose, we were led
eventually to reinvestigate the substance of the science.
The substance of science comprises more than the discovery and
recording of data; it extends crucially to include the act of
interpretation. It may seem obvious that a scientific document is
incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so
obvious that the document cannot "exist" without the interpretation of
each reader. In other words, writers cannot "merely" record data, even
if they try. In any recording or articulation, no matter how
haphazard or confused, each word resides in one or more distinct
structural locations. The resulting structure, even more than the
meanings of individual words, significantly influences the reader
during the act of interpretation. The question then becomes whether
the structure created by the writer (intentionally or not) helps or
hinders the reader in the process of interpreting the scientific
writing.
The writing principles we have suggested here make conscious for
the writer some of the interpretive clues readers derive from
structures. Armed with this awareness, the writer can achieve far
greater control (although never complete control) of the reader's
interpretive process. As a concomitant function, the principles
simultaneously offer the writer a fresh re-entry to the thought
process that produced the science. In real and important ways, the
structure of the prose becomes the structure of the scientific
argument. Improving either one will improve the other.
Williams, Joseph M. 1988. Style: Ten Lessons in
Clarity and Grace. Scott, Foresman, & Co.
Colomb, Gregory G., and Joseph M. Williams. 1985. Perceiving
structure in professional prose: a multiply determined experience. In
Writing in Non-Academic Settings, eds. Lee Odell and Dixie
Goswami. Guilford Press, pp. 87-128.
Gopen, George D. 1987. Let the buyer in ordinary course of
business beware: suggestions for revising the language of the Uniform
Commercial Code. University of Chicago Law Review
54:1178-1214.
Gopen, George D. 1990. The Common Sense of Writing: Teaching
Writing from the Reader's Perspective. To be published.
Writing with the Reader in Mind: Expectation and Context
t(time)=15', T(temperature)=32¦, t=0', T=25¦;
t=6', T=29¦; t=3', T=27¦; t=12', T=32¦; t=9';
T=31¦
time (min) temperature(¦C)
0 25
3 27
6 29
9 31
12 32
15 32
temperature(¦C) time(min)
25 0
27 3
29 6
31 9
32 12
32 15
Reader Expectations for the Structure of Prose
Information is
interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is placed where most
readers expect to find it.
Subject-Verb Separation
Beginning with the
exciting material and ending with a lack of luster often leaves us
disappointed and destroys our sense of momentum.
The Stress Position
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.
The information that
begins a sentence establishes for the reader a perspective for
viewing the sentence as a unit.
The Topic Position
The rates
Therefore...one
subsequent mainshocks
great plate boundary ruptures
the southern segment of the San Andreas fault
the smaller the standard deviation...
approximately uniform
large ruptures of the same fault
different amounts of slip
vary by a factor of 2
variations of several decades
predictions of future mainshock
In our experience, the
misplacement of old and new information turns out to be he No. 1
problem in American professional writing today.
Put in the topic
position the old information that links backward; put in the stress
position the new information you want the reader to
emphasize.
Perceiving Logical Gaps
Locating the Action
is...is
are presumed to be
are transcribed
has
is...can be alleviated
destabilizes
As critical scientific
readers, we would like to concentrate our energy on whether the
experiments prove the hypotheses.
Writing and the Scientific Process
It may seem obvious
that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of
the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot "exist"
without the interpretation of each reader.
The methodology described in this article originated in
the linguistic work of Joseph M. Williams of the University of
Chicago, Gregory G. Colomb of the Georgia Institute of Technology and
George D. Gopen. Some of the materials presented here were discussed
and developed in faculty writing workshops held at the Duke University
Medical School.
Bibliography