Cohesion and Clarity
12- 2
2.Effective scientific writing is complete.
Complete writing means that you have provided your readers with all the information they need to understand your story — no more, no less. English is a writer-responsible language rather than a reader-responsible language, which means that as a writer, you are expected to explain everything that your readers need to know — all the relevant facts and procedures and all the steps in the reasoning process that led you to your hypothesis and conclusion — in language your readers can understand. Learning how much to tell comes with practice and experience.
3.Effective scientific writing is linear.
In linear writing, as the name suggests, thoughts and ideas are expressed sequentially, that is, in a line, and every new idea is connected to the previous ones. Linear style suits scientific writing because it is shorter, more direct, and easier to follow than some other writing styles. If you think of writing as a set of directions to a certain destination, linear style would be a straight road with signs clearly marking each stage of the journey. Other styles might take a longer, less direct route to the same destination. (Such a route might allow travelers to take in more scenery along the way, but they are also more likely to get lost!) Writing styles vary from culture to culture. According to Elaine Campbell, author of ESL Resource Book for Engineers and Scientists, “Japanese paragraphs tend to define by eliminating what a subject is not. French and Spanish writing may include digressive material to support a topic sentence, and Semitic languages [such as Arabic] develop paragraphs by a set of parallel constructions. Writing in English, in contrast, remains predominantly linear.”
“In the West, we tend most often to think and write in ways that are linear. In other words, we admire writing that ‘gets to the point.’” — Composition Center, Dartmouth University (www.dartmouth.edu/˜compose/tutor/problems/esl.html)
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