Cohesion and Clarity
12- 10
“Steady movement, a quality of fluent and graceful prose, should run through an entire paper. The stopping points at ends of paragraphs and ends of sections should not really be stops but pauses that close out units of thought and signal to the reader that a new start is about to be made.” — Edward J. Huth, How to Write and Publish Papers in the Medical Sciences
√ Use words that are precise and strong rather than vague or general.
Precise words enable your readers to understand and visualize your message. In the examples below, notice the differences in precision between the words in italics:
Weak: Many older people have bone fractures each year.
Better: In the United States, nearly 1 million fractures occur annually in people over the age of 65 years. (From Boyden et al., 2002) Strong, precise action verbs are more descriptive and tell the reader much more than do such vague, weak verbs as be, do, make, have, seem, appear, and exist . Weak: The other method is dependent on DNA uptake facilitated by polyethylene glycol. Better : The other method depends on DNA uptake facilitated by polyethylene glycol. Weak : The results seem to suggest that the patients who were given imatinib mesylate had milder side effects than did the patients given conventional therapy. Better : The results suggest that the patients who were given imatinib mesylate had milder side effects than did the patients given conventional therapy. You can sometimes strengthen a sentence by changing a noun to a verb:
Weak: We conducted an investigation.
Better: We investigated ….
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