Connecting Your Ideas
Although your sentences are precise, clear, and energetic, your writing still might not succeed at the paragraph level.
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Connecting Your Ideas All of my graduate students learned to write with precision and clarity, but only a few wrote with seamless transitions between the ideas. You had the impression that for these few the writing came without effort, but of course it did not [1]. —Karen Thole
Although your sentences are precise, clear, and energetic, your writing still might not succeed at the paragraph level. Another stylistic criterion for success at this level is that the ideas of the individual sentences connect. While each sentence conveys one idea, a paragraph conveys a group of linked ideas. Unfortunately, many paragraphs in scientific writing falter because the sentences are disconnected:
How long can you read this style of writing? Ten pages? Two pages? Most readers lose interest before the end of the paragraph, even though the paragraph discusses the Earth’s most dramatic geophysical event of the past 100 years. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 M. Alley, The Craft of Scientific Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8288-9_5
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One reason that the paragraph falters is that the reader has to work hard to see the connections between some of the sentences. For example, the connection between sentence 2 and sentence 1 does not occur until the last three words of sentence 2: 1. Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980. 2. A cloud of hot rock and gas surged northward from its collapsing slope.
Once the audience figures out the connection to the first sentence, so many disconnected details have already passed that many in the audience have to reread the sentence. When audiences have to reread in this way, they often claim that the writing is “choppy” or “does not flow.” Although having weak connections between ideas is certainly a problem in this paragraph, an even larger problem is that the sentences lack variety. Stagnant sentence rhythms make for tiresome reading. Even readers deeply interested in the content have difficulty enduring more than a paragraph or two of this style. In addition, the longer a document is, the bigger this problem of not varying sentences becomes. As shown in Figure 5-1, one cause for the lack of sentence variety is that all the sentences open with a subject noun: “Mount St. Helens” “cloud,” “effects,” “origin,” and so forth. Adding to the lack of variety of sentence openers is that all the sentences have a single main clause, as opposed to a compound main clause or Figure 5-1. Depiction of where the subject (dark block) occurs in each sentence of the volcano paragraph. For energetic rhythms, this position should vary.
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an added dependent clause. For that reason, each sentence has only one subject. Because the subject naturally receives a heavier beat than other words in the sentence and because this lone beat appears at the beginning of every sentence, a tiresome pattern develops. Yet another source for the lack of sentence variety is that all the sentences have roughly the same length: 8
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