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

The broken couple
Require less from memory
The reading toolkit

Wasted water, wasted thoughts

Vladimir stood still, hands under the hot water tap waiting for the water to become warm, wasting cold water down the sink. His problem-solving brain kicked into gear.

“Why don’t plumbers place the water heater close to the hot water tap, he wondered. Alternatively, I suppose one could use plastic pipes or insulate the heat-sinking metal pipes. Of course, I could always buy a thermostatic tap… with my next bonus check.”

His musings were interrupted by the arrival of the hot water and by the thought that he already had these thoughts before.

When reading a sentence in which the verb never seems to arrive, has it occurred to you that your reader may also waste, or worse, be distracted by the words that separate the subject from its verb? Details inserted between the main components of a sentence burden (burden comes from the old French bourdon, a hum or buzz — but do we need to know that?) the memory because they move apart two words that the reader expects to see together, such as the verb (burden) and its object (the memory) in this sentence.

Keep these happy couples close to each other.

Separating the subject and the verb, as illustrated in 1, can be devastating.

Figure 1

The nesting of phrases has the same effect as plunging the reader below comprehension level. In the end, all of the details below the comprehension level will be forgotten. Two broken couples are responsible for this: (1) The subject (’Tom Smith’s assumption’) is separated from the verb (’is not supported’) by two nested sentences starting with ’that’; and (2) the phrase ’the by-products’ is separated from ’that had migrated’ by the phrase ’of the pinhole corrosion,’ creating some confusion. It is not the corrosion that migrates, it is the by-products; To avoid the confusing double nesting, the writer could have changed ’that had migrated’ into the noun ’migration’ as ’that no top layer material could come from the migration of the pinhole corrosion by-products.’ The sentence would have been clearer.

Memory registers

Curiosity pushed Vladimir to open up his antique TRS80 computer to look at the printed circuit board. He could not quite recall what CPU was in use back then. Close to the heat sink, he spotted the long CPU chip, the Intel 8085 microprocessor. He remembered studying its structure back in 1981. That was when he discovered for the first time that rapid access to memory is so critical to the overall speed of a microprocessor, that the central processing unit (CPU) has its own dedicated memory registers right on the chip, under the same roof so to speak. This collocation allows ultrafast storage and retrieval of data from these internal registers compared to the time it takes to store and retrieve data from external memory.

To increase reading performance through fast memory access, keep syntactically or semantically closely related items on the same page, in the same paragraph, in the same sentence, or on the same line. The reader will appreciate the increase in reading speed.