Scientific writing 3.0: A reader and writer's guide - Jean-Luc Lebrun, Justin Lebrun 2021

The detached pronoun
Require less from memory
The reading toolkit

This, it, them, their, and they are all pronouns. A pronoun replaces a noun, a phrase, a sentence, or even a full paragraph. Like the acronym, it acts as a shortcut to avoid repetition.

Pronouns and acronyms are both pointers. This characteristic is at the root of the problems they create:

· If you point to where someone was sitting an hour ago to refer to that person, not even the people who were there may remember who that person was. If the pronoun points to a noun already gone from the reader’ short-term memory because it is located 80 words back in the text, the noun-pronoun link is broken. This disconnection is insufficient to discourage readers. They read on, but with less clarity of thought.

· If during your speech you mention and point towards a friend standing in a group thirty meters away from you, only the people who know that person will know whom you are referring to; no one else will. Prior knowledge disambiguates. When the pronoun points to several likely candidates, the non-expert reader — whose incomplete understanding of the text does not allow disambiguation — will pick the most likely candidate and read on, hoping to be right. If that likely candidate is the wrong one, then interpretation errors follow.

The fat cat ate a mouse. It had been without food for a week.

What had been without food for a week, the cat or the mouse? The writer knows, of course, but the reader, left guessing, attempts to guess what ’it’ means, using logical inference. One could assume that ’it’ refers to the cat — if it was hungry from not eating for a week, it would make sense that it chased and caught the mouse.

If instead the adjective “thin” were to be added to describe the mouse, as in “the cat ate a thin mouse”, we would then use our logic to infer that it in the next sentence now describes the mouse.

· Finally some fingers seem to point to nobody, or they point to things still to come.

It was deemed appropriate to exclude women from the sample.

This sentence starts with the infamous ’it,’ the passive voice companion. Who is ’it’? The person who deemed ’it’ appropriate is hidden from the reader. Is ’it’ the writer? The supervisor? The research department manager?

And some fingers point to things or people still to come. If you point to where someone is going to be standing five minutes from now to refer to that person, the people will have to wait to know who that person is. This creates tension.

Our surprise speaker for this evening is a great archer. He has been ….

… Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome Professor William Tell.

Apart from these situations where the substitute for the pronoun lives in the reader’s future, it only takes milliseconds for the brain to choose a likely candidate for the pronoun. What influences the choice of candidate?

1)The reader’s knowledge. The more superficial the knowledge, the more error-prone the choice will be.

2)The context. When there are multiple candidates, the reader uses context and logic — as in the cat example.

3)The distance between the candidate and the pronoun. Candidates that are many words away from the pronoun are unlikely to be chosen.

4)The grammar. A singular pronoun (this) or a plural pronoun (these, them, they) helps guide the choice, and so does gender (he or she, her, his).

In the following example, try to determine what the underlined pronoun ’their’ refers to. The three candidates are in bold. Had the sentence been clear, this task would have been instantaneous. As it is, you will probably struggle; but if you do not, ask yourself how much your knowledge of the field has helped you make the correct choice.

The cellular automaton (CA) cell, a natural candidate to model the electrical activity of a cell, is an ideal component to use in the simulation of intercellular communications, such as those occurring between cardiac cells, and to model abnormal asynchronous propagations, such as ectopic beats, initiated and propagated cell-to-cell, regardless of the complexity of THEIR patterns.

It is difficult to determine the plural noun pointed to by ’their’ because the sentence segment ’regardless of the complexity of their patterns’ could be moved around in the sentence, and still make sense.

… to use in the simulation of intercellular communications, regardless of the complexity of their patterns…

…to model abnormal asynchronous propagations, regardless of the complexity of their patterns…

…such as ectopic beats, regardless of the complexity of their patterns…

Communications, propagations, and beats can all display complex patterns. Let us decide that in this text, ’their’ represents the ’abnormal asynchronous propagations.’

The ambiguity can be removed in different ways. One could omit the detail. The long sentence would be seven words shorter.

The cellular automaton (CA) cell, a natural candidate to model the electrical activity of a cell, is an ideal component to use in the simulation of intercellular communications, such as those occurring between cardiac cells, and to model abnormal asynchronous propagations, such as ectopic beats, initiated and propagated cell-to-cell.

One could rewrite the part of the sentence that creates a problem to make the pronoun disappear.

The cellular automaton (CA) cell — a natural candidate to model the electrical activity of a cell — is an ideal component to use in the simulation of intercellular communications, such as those occurring between cardiac cells, and to model the cell-to-cell initiation and propagation of abnormal asynchronous events (such as ectopic beats) with or without complex patterns.

One could repeat the noun instead of using a pronoun.

The cellular automaton (CA) cell, a natural candidate to model the electrical activity of a cell, is an ideal component to use in the simulation of intercellular communications, such as those occurring between cardiac cells, and to model abnormal asynchronous events, such as ectopic beats, initiated and propagated cell-to-cell, however complex the propagation patterns may be.

However, these are all quick fixes. The best way to handle this situation is to return to the source of the problem, in this case, the extreme length of this sentence. A complete rewriting is necessary.

Cardiac cells communicate by initiating and propagating electric signals cell to cell. The signal propagation patterns are sometimes complex as in the case of abnormal asynchronous ectopic beats. To model such complexity, we used a Cellular Automaton cell (CA cell).

The length of the rewritten text is only about 70% that of the original. The paragraph is clearer, shorter, and without the pronouns ’those’ and ’their’.

Pattern matching

That day, Vladimir could not understand why the paragraph he was reading was so obscure. The usual culprits were absent: the grammar was correct and the sentence length was average for a scientific article. Then Vladimir roared as if he had aligned three gold bars in a slot machine. His superior pattern matching brain had aligned three synonymous expressions:

Each column contained either identical words, or synonyms. Vladimir decided to replace each of the expressions with ’known location’. When the fog created by the synonyms cleared, the structural problems of the paragraph appeared in full light.