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4 Structuring
Paragraphs and Sentences
What the experts say
It’s far more difficult to be simple than complicated.
John Ruskin, English art critic and social thinker
Human beings are not logical mechanisms into which information can be fed.
Bruce M Cooper, author of “Writing Technical Reports”
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4.1 The key to good writing: always
think about the reader
4.1 The key to good writing: always think about the reader
Good writing very much depends on the role that you expect
the reader to play and
the effort you expect them to make. But this role varies considerably from culture
to culture. Congjun Mu, Vice Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Shanghai
Institute of Technology in China explains:
A key factor in Eastern rhetoric is reader-responsibility, which means that the reader is
responsible for making all the connections between sentences, paragraphs and overall ideas
that the author has laid out in his/her paper. This is distinguished from writer-responsibility
in English rhetoric, where the reader is expected to make less effort and can thus hopefully
absorb the argumentation rapidly.
In good English technical writing, the author writes in such a way that minimal
effort is required by the reader. The writer is nearly 100% responsible for whether
the reader understands the text or not. Reader-centered writing also means that
more people will appreciate your paper, and thus they will be more likely to cite it
in their own papers.
Try reading the following text.
NON-NATIVE SPEAKERSTYPICALLYSAYTHATENGLISH ISASIMPLE LANGUAGE
BECAUSE IT FAVORS SHORT CLEAR SENTENCES SuCh NoN-nAtiVe spEAkeRS
thEn saythattheirownlanguageisnotlikeEnglishbecauseitfavorslong complex sentences
The passage above is difficult to read because it is not how a text is usually pre-
sented. The same effort that it took you to read the above passage is similar to the
effort that will be required by a referee or native English speaker to follow your text
if it is poorly structured, and full of ambiguity and redundancy. Poor readability has
a monetary cost. If you force your reader to spend a lot of energy and time on deci-
phering your papers, you are also stopping them from spending the same time and
energy on their work.
To write well, you need to know exactly how people read.
Today, much reading is done directly from a screen, rather than from a hard copy.
Because we generally want information fast, particularly when searching on the
Internet, we tend to scan. Scanning means not reading each individual word, but jump-
ing forwards three or more words (or sentences) at a time. The distance that we jump
(in terms of number of words or sentences) depends on the value that those words are
adding in our search for information. If they add no value we tend to jump further.
If we continue to get no value, instead of scanning left to right along a line of text,
we scroll from top to bottom. We thus read vertically rather than horizontally until
we find what we want.
In an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, Tracy Seeley, an English pro-
fessor at the University of San Francisco, noted that after a conversation with some
of her students she discovered that “most can’t concentrate on reading a text for
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4 Structuring Paragraphs and Sentences
more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We’re being trained away from slow
reading by new technology.” In an email to me she added that “papers need to get
to the point quickly” and that “good writing is even more important now in order
to hold reader’s attention”.
The same Guardian article quoted two research projects, the Poynter Institute’s
Eyetrack survey, and an analysis by Jakob Nielsen (a Danish web usability expert),
whose results show that only half of readers who begin an article, will actually
finish it, and if the article is read online, only a fifth of readers will finish it.
This has huge implications for you as a writer. No one will be under any obligation
to read your paper. If readers don’t find it useful or interesting or at least pleasur-
able, and they have the feeling that it was not written with them in mind, they will
simply stop reading. Your findings will then be lost in oblivion.
Every word you write needs to be understood by the reader. The style should be
specific, emphatic and concise. Everything should be relevant. Readers are gene-
rally lazy and in a hurry. They need to be able understand everything the first time
they read. Don’t force your reader to wait till the end of a sentence, paragraph or
section in order to be able to put all the pieces of the jigsaw together. Instead of a
jigsaw, a good writer of English has a chain as a writing model. Within a sentence,
each word forms a chain to make the meaning of the sentence clear. And each sen-
tence forms a chain with the next, so that the reader is guided link-by-link and
step-by-step towards the writer’s conclusions.
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