The distant background - Require less from memory - The reading toolkit

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

The distant background
Require less from memory
The reading toolkit

The Macintosh factory

When Vladimir moved to Cupertino California, in 1986, to work as a summer intern at the Apple headquarters, he was taken on a tour to visit the Macintosh factory in nearby Fremont. Every day, truckloads of components and parts came in, just enough for one day’s production; and every day, containers of Macintoshes were shipped out. The net result: no local storage, no warehousing. Vladimir was witnessing the very efficient technique of just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing.

Ask anyone where background is located in a scientific paper, and the answer will consistently be ’the introduction’. Well, yes… and no. If background material is of no immediate use to the reader, it rapidly fades out of memory.

The variable types

There are two types of variables in a computer program: global and local variables. Why? To allow the program to manage computer memory space more efficiently. Global variables require permanent memory storage whereas local variables free up their temporary memory storage space as soon as the program exits the subroutine where they were used. Could this wonderful concept apply to writing?

Parking all background material in the introductory sections of your paper greatly increases the demands on memory. Background material comes in two flavors: the global background, applicable to the whole paper; and the local or just-in-time background, useful only within a section or paragraph of your paper. The just-in-time background imposes no memory load: it immediately precedes or follows what it clarifies. Here is a just-in-time example.

Additional information is readily available from “context” — other words found near the word considered.

In this example, the word “context” is defined as soon as it appears.

ImageWhen a heading or subheading in your paper contains a new word requiring explanation, explain it in the first sentence under the heading, in a just-in-time fashion.

Lysozyme solution preparation

Lysozyme, an enzyme contained in egg white, …

In this subheading from an article for a chemistry journal, the word ’lysozyme’ is expected to be new to the reader. The writer defines it just-in-time in the first sentence of the section, using what grammarians call “an apposition” — a phrase that clarifies what precedes it. Kept short, appositions are very effective. Long, they are ineffective as the following sentence demonstrates.

Lysozyme, a substance capable of dissolving certain bacteria, and present in egg white and saliva but also tears where it breaks down the cell wall of germs, is used without purification.

Appositions are also ineffective when they slow down reading and lengthen a sentence as in the earlier example.

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 abnormal asynchronous propagations, such as ectopic beats, initiated and propagated cell-to-cell, regardless of the complexity of their patterns.

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Select each custom-worded heading and subheading (i.e., not the standard methodology, results and discussion headings). Read the sentence that immediately follows that heading/subheading. It should provide the background for the heading. If not, modify that sentence.