The Science Of Scientific Writing    Set D  Introduction   Multi-part Sentences   The End of the Sentence  Exercise 1   The Start of the Sentence  The Middle of the Sentence   Sentence, Paragraph compared   Mapping Multi-part Sentences   Exercise 2   Types of Sentence Part   Exercise X   Advanced Sentence Stories   Final Page   .

Course Home

OVERVIEW: The way to well-written science

How to do the Course

PART I: Paragraphs and Sentences

SET A: Paragraphs: The Maps Behind Them

SET B: Paragraphs: Using Maps to Meet Readers' Expectations

SET C: Paragraph Coherence and Cohesion

SET D: Sentences

SET E: Scientific Sections (including Methods)

SET F: Scientific Sections: The Discussion

SET G : Scientific Sections: The Introduction

SET H : The Paper as a Whole

Like a paragraph, a sentence is more easily understood if its most important information stands out

When we first considered the benefits of using paragraphs, we saw that we could use paragraphs to direct our readers' attention to a "sensible" number of landmark sentences that could then help the readers to navigate the text. Not all the sentences in a text have equal weight, and it helps our readers if we can make them focus on the most important ones. A similar challenge exists when we come to write sentences, particularly long "multi-part" ones: these may contain multiple blocks of information (often organised as clauses and phrases), and we will want our readers to pay attention to some more than others. To do this, we have at our disposal a wide range of strategies, some quite simple, others requiring a reasonable proficiency with English grammar. In this Set we will look at some of these strategies.

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