The Science of Scientific Writing

Motivation(s)

Science is often hard to read because scientists focus on the presentation of information and thought rather than its actual communication. They produce prose linearly through time; often their primary anxiety is to capture the important new thought before it escapes. They ignore the plethora of effective writing principles as their objective is not the reader’s need for receiving the material.

Proposed Solution(s)

The authors propose a reader-expectation methodology based off literature in rhetoric, linguistics, and cognitive psychology to make conscious for the writer some of the interpretive clues readers derives from structures. The writers from these fields emphasize communication, and thus they generally do not suffer from poorly formed scientific jargon.

Evaluation(s)

The methodology was applied to convoluted published and accepted research articles. The result was significantly more comprehensible without minimizing any of their complexity. Note that the authors do not claim to reproduce the writer’s original intentions.

Future Direction(s)

• Looking at the unit of discourse as a graph, does good writing have a detectable structure possibly uncovered via deep learning?

• Adhering to the methodology does not guarantee success, but can a boundary be established to signify safe zones?

• The authors claim that too many reader expectations are functioning at any given moment for structural decisions to remain clear and easily activated; can a reader’s expectation be detected and the content be adjusted to match?

• The authors also claim that any reader expectation can be violated to good effect; what are the preconditions and postconditions to this?

Question(s)

• Is this all the descriptions of a reader’s thought process?

Analysis

All writings should follow and not slavishly adhere to the concept of reader expectations. The content of this paper can be interpreted as a high level summary of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. The proposed methodology described exactly how I read things and I can feel the discourse of the revised articles becoming more fluid. I have always been taught active voice is preferable, but this paper says sometimes passive voice is more effective. What is most surprising is the claim no fixed algorithm for good writing. The key discussions could serve as a baseline for future algorithmic development.

Notes

Reader Expectation and Context

• Substance versus Structure

  • Two column description of tracking the temperature of a liquid over time is more effective than a serialized representation.

  • Putting the time element on the left column establishes context (time) and produces an expectation of regularity due to the nature of the data.

  • The second column has new less obvious pattern, the discovery of which is the point of the tabular structure.

• Shape

  • A unit of discourse is defined as anything with a beginning and an end: a clause, a sentence, a section, an article, etc…

  • Each unit of discourse, no matter what the size, is expected to serve a single function, to make a single point.

  • Information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is placed where most readers expect to find it.

Subject-Verb Separation

• Readers expect a grammatical subject to be followed immediately by the verb.

  • Without the verb, we do not know what the subject is doing, or what the sentence is all about.

• The reader’s need for syntactic resolution, fulfilled only by the arrival of a verb, shifts the focus of attention to the arrival of the verb.

  • Anything of length that intervenes between subject and verb is read as an interruption, and hence as something of lesser importance.

The Stress Position

• Beginning with the exciting material and ending with a lack of luster often leaves us disappointed and destroys our sense of momentum.

• Readers naturally emphasize the material that arrives at the end of a sentence.

  • We tend to take something like a “mental breath” as we begin to read each new sentence.

  • 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; this is coupled with the fact that humans are delighted when they are rewarded at the end of their laborious task (reading).

• Placing emphatic material in non-stress positions can only have a bad effect on readers.

  • Readers might find the material occupying the stress position unworthy of emphasis, discard the current material and look without any additional structural clue for the most likely candidate for emphasis.

  • Readers might emphasize the imposter material that the writer did not intend to stress.

• The stress position coincides with the moment of syntactic closure.

  • A whole list, numbered and indented, can occupy the stress position if it has been clearly announced as being all that remains of that sentence.

  • Each member of that list may have its own internal stress position since each member may produce its own syntactic closure.

• A sentence is too long when it has more viable candidates for stress positions than there are stress positions available.

• Secondary stress positions can be formed via colon or semicolon.

• 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 Topic Position

• 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.

• Readers expect the material occupying the topic position to provide them with linkage (looking backward) and context (looking forward).

• When old information consistently arrives in the topic position, it focuses attention on one particular strand of the discussion.

• 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.

  • The person, thing, or concept whose story it is appears in the topic position.

Perceiving Logical Gaps

• When old information does not appear at all in a sentence, readers are left to construct the logical linkage by themselves.

• Do not neglect to articulate essential connections.

Locating the Action

• Readers expect the action of a sentence to be articulated by the verb.

• If the actions are not to be found in the verbs, there are no secondary structural clues to identify the actions.

• Attending to any one structural problem eventually leads us to all the others.

References

GS90

George D Gopen and Judith A Swan. The science of scientific writing. American Scientist, 78(6):550–558, 1990.