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

Twist and shout
Sustain attention to ensure continuous reading
The reading toolkit

… Shout

’Twist and Shout,’ a song The Beatles made popular, is an attention grabbing heading that requires explanation. The twists, in our attention-grabbing context, are the twists in the story plot. The shouts are all things that call the reader to attention.

Shouting is quite easy!

Turn up the visual volume; add subheadings and contributive visuals.

Surrounded by vision-enhancing white space, subheadings shout in their bold font suits. Subheadings tell the reader how your story is moving forward. Therefore, make your subheadings as informative and indicative of content as possible. Avoid vague subheadings such as Simulation or Experiment, but also avoid excessively specific ones that contain keywords not even in your abstract.

Bring changes to format and style.

Used in moderation,

1)A numbered list,

2)Bold

3)Underlined

4)Italic text

5)a change in font

6)A box around text

are equivalent to raising the volume of your voice, or changing its pitch or prosody. These changes break the monotony of paragraphs and make things stand out (note that the publisher may limit your choices by imposing a standard format and regulating the use of styles).

Change sentence length, and ask questions.

After a long sentence, and particularly at the end of a paragraph, a short sentence carries much emphasis. It shouts. Why? It does not clog the memory, its syntax is fast to process, and its meaning is easier to understand. The last sentence of the following paragraph is four times shorter than the three sentences that precede it. That short sentence not only shouts, it screams!

Annotations on paper photos were all manual; they were either implicit (one photo album by event, location, or subject) or explicit (scribbles on the back of photos). In today’s digital world, while some annotations are still manual, most, like time, date and sometimes GPS location, are automatically entered in the photo file by the camera. Is it conceivable that one day automatic annotations will be extended to include major life events, familiar scenery, or familiar faces, thus removing the need for manual annotations? Yes, and that day is upon us.

The theme of the paragraph is photo annotation — yesterday, today and tomorrow. The passive voice used throughout the paragraph is just a writer’s tool to achieve the writer’s purpose: automation is inevitable. You may argue that it is possible to rewrite this paragraph using the active voice. I agree, and to show you that the active voice is not a panacea, healing all writing problems, here is the “active” paragraph. This example will also help us discover one more attention sustaining technique.

Change sentence syntax and length.

Annotating paper photos was a manual task, implicit (photo albums by event, location, or subject) or explicit (scribbles on the back of photos). Annotating digital photos is an automatic task for digital cameras (time, date, and sometimes GPS location inserted in the photo’s data file). Annotating automatically the previously manually entered data will tomorrow be possible for major life events, familiar scenery, or familiar faces.

All three sentences share a constant topic located upfront (’annotating’). All three sentences are written in the active voice. All three sentences have similar lengths. And all three sentences follow exactly the same syntax: subject, verb, and object. Parallelism in length and syntax over more than two sentences loses its magic. The reader is bored. A statement now replaces the suspenseful question. And even though the paragraph is more concise (65 words versus 88), it is now lifeless.

Convey importance with words that act like pointing fingers.

Certain words excel at guiding the attention if used sparingly. if overused, they lose all meaning, and in fact can begin to annoy the reader. These words give you a way to reveal the salient facts amongst all the facts.

more importantly, significantly, notably, in particular, particularly, especially, even, nevertheless

Keep the same contribution in front of the reader throughout your paper.

To make sure that the reader never loses sight of the paper’s contribution, the writer scientist mentions it in every part of the paper: the title, the abstract, the introduction, the conclusion, the figures, the body of the paper, and even title-echoing words from the headings and subheadings. But if the writer cloaks the contribution with synonyms, if the writer seems to tell a different story in the title, abstract or conclusion, or if the writer digresses, then the reader may wonder what the contribution really is.

… Twist

There are always opportunities for tension in a scientific paper. It may be a limit you are about to circumvent, or an exception you are ready to exploit. It may be a common point of view you are about to change, or a gap you are about to bridge.

Announce contrasted views or facts.

Special introductory words will bring you as close to drama as you’ll ever be in a scientific paper.

however, but, contrary to, although, in contrast, on the other hand, while, whereas, whilst, only, unable to, worse, the problem is that …

Things are not always as perfect as they look at first sight.

“Although COBRA (Cost Based operator Rate Adaptation) has shown itself to be beneficial for timetabling problems, Tuson & Ross [266, 271] found it provided only equal or worse solution quality over a wide range of other test problems, compared with carefully chosen fixed operator probabilities.”¹

Twists are tales of the unexpected. Too often scientific papers are tales of the expected. If papers are dull, it is because all difficulties encountered during the research have been erased from the public record. Only what works is presented.

Keep enough of the unexpected difficulties to sustain interest and build in the reader’s mind the image of a resourceful scientist.

interestingly, curiously, surprisingly, might have (but did not), unexpectedly, unforeseen, seemingly, unusual, different from, …

In the next example, the modal verb ’might have’ intrigues the reader. … might have, but did not! It sets the expectation that the writer will explain why the method is not as applicable as originally thought.

The Global Induction Rule method [3], a natural language processing method, might have worked on news video segmentation since news contents can be expressed in a form similar to that used for text documents: word, phrase, and sentence.

Use numbers.

Too many numbers distract the reader and clog the memory, but a couple of well-chosen numbers grab the attention. Numbers have considerable attractive power.

After 60 years old, your brain loses 0.5% of its volume per year.

0.5% makes this sentence precise and dramatic (at least for the elderly), and ’millions’ attracts attention in the following example.

After proliferation, the embryonic cells are collected and put into new culture dishes, a process called ’replating’. After 180 such replatings, millions of normal and still undifferentiated embryonic cells are available.

Announce the alternative routes when you are about to change direction in your story plot.

rather than, instead of, alternatively

“Instead of unidirectional motion along a single pathway, can we have unguided motion through the myriad of shapes?²”