More advice on writing clear and lively prose -- Susan Brennan

Here is some additional advice on writing, to accompany the memo from Herb Clark. Prose that follows this advice is much easier to read than the ponderous, "academic" prose that some students think is expected of them.

1. Whenever possible, put your topic in the subject position of a sentence. And don't make something the topic of a sentence unless you mean it to be. One common mistake is to feature the author of an article as a topic when what you are really talking about is his or her idea or evidence. Consider this example from a student paper:

"Balkan (1971) maintains that individuals can be classified as right or left-movers,

depending on the predominant direction of their eyes when asked reflective questions."

This sentence suggests you will then go on to talk about how you disagree with Balkan (or else worship the ground he walks on). But if you intend to build on his ideas (in this case, say, what goes along with being classified as a right- or left-mover), try something like this:

An important way to think about structuring your sentences is in terms of "given" and "new" information. In English, given information tends to go early in the utterance, and new information tends to go at the end. While you don't need to write exactly the way you speak in order to be clear, observing this given/new principle can make your writing much easier to understand. Depending on the context, the previous example might also be expressed as:

After this sentence, the reader will expect to hear about the psychological differences next. Putting the most important, new information at the end of the sentence will give your writing more impact. Avoid weighing down the end of your sentences with afterthoughts: This muffles your argument.

2. Take the distance out of your writing. In scientific writing, there's often a great deal of agentless activity. Compare:

"It is often the case that people form stereotypes based on incorrect information."

with

"People often form stereotypes based on incorrect information."

Another way to take out the distance is to prefer the active voice over the passive. It' can be quite a challenge to write the methods section of an experimental psychology article without using the passive voice, but you can try. In this case, what our eighth grade English teachers told us still holds true.

But sometimes you should use the passive voice. A good reason for doing so would be to get your topic (the thing your reader's attention should be focused on already) into the early part of the sentence.

3. Stick to your terms. This piece of advice may involve unlearning what your eighth-grade English teacher may have taught you. Back then, I was taught not to use the same word over and over again, but to use synonyms, as a kind of stylistic strategy. Unfortunately, this strategy puts a major burden on the reader. Consider the next example:

vs.

"Transfer of training occurs from one hand to the other. The extent of this transfer

ranges from 34% (Siipola, 1935) to 89% (Cook, 1935)."

Repeating the same terms makes your prose much easier for your readers to understand - they have to keep fewer terms in working memory, and they have an easier time keeping track of whether you're still talking about the same thing. The linguist Dwight Bolinger said it best: "Every difference makes a difference." Choose your terms carefully. Use different terms to add information or make distinctions.

In addition, repeating the same terms can be an effective and convincing rhetorical technique. Your goal is to convince your readers that your data are important and your argument is a good one. There's no need to impress them with how many different words you know. A written argument, even (or especially!) one in a scholarly paper, is bound to be more convincing if it leans a less toward Roget's Thesaurus and a (a bit) more toward a Jesse Jackson speech.

Parallel structures give your reader hooks to hang your argument on. The next two examples use the parallel structure "x, while y":

"Left-movers had better perceptual-motor abilities, while right-movers obtained higher

quantitative and verbal scores."

This sentence can be improved further:

"Left-movers had better perceptual-motor abilities, while right-movers had better

quantitative and verbal abilities."

And the next sentence:

"This view is supported by research demonstrating that numerical and verbal questions,

designed to activate the left hemisphere, more often resulted in right eye movements,

while spatial and musical questions, intended to stimulate the right hemisphere, usually

resulted in left eye movements."

can be improved in this way:

"The evidence for this is that numerical and verbal questions, designed to activate the

left hemisphere, more often resulted in right eye movements, while spatial and musical

questions, designed to activate the right hemisphere, more often resulted in left eye

movements.

4. Order your argument. You can organize your writing either top-down or bottom-up. Top-down is usually better, as the reader doesn't have to work as hard. This is the one piece of advice I have the most trouble following. It seems that I sometimes try to drag the poor reader through the same process of discovery I had to go through myself, as I worked through the ideas I'm writing about. Such suspenseful writing is not so appropriate for scientific papers (and it's hard to do successfully). If you have this problem, try turning a paragraph inside out after you've written it, so the conclusion becomes a topic statement, followed by the supporting arguments. Sometimes this improves the organization.