Recreate local suspense - Sustain attention to ensure continuous reading - The reading toolkit

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

Recreate local suspense
Sustain attention to ensure continuous reading
The reading toolkit

The structure of a scientific article leaves little room for suspense. The gist of the contribution is revealed immediately in title and abstract, well before the reader reaches the conclusions. Therefore, suspense has to be artificially recreated.

Do you know what might reduce the accelerated shrinking of your brain and possibly slow down the onset of dementia in your old age?

ImageThe master of suspense, the most underused and underrated tool in the writer’s toolbox is… the question mark ’?’

It is the quintessential universal trigger to guided thought processes. Questions make people curious. As soon as the writer expresses a question, it becomes the reader’s question and remains so until the answer comes.

1. A question refocuses the mind and prepares it for an answer.

2. A question establishes the topic of a paragraph clearly.

3. A question moves ideas in a given direction.

4. A question lingers in the mind until it is answered — oh, by the way, the answer to the shrinking brain question is Vitamin B.

Does one always need a question mark to ask a question?

No. The question mark makes a question explicit, but there are ways of raising implicit questions. In grammar, the only question that comes without a question mark is the indirect question. It is asked by the author.

We wondered whether our data cleaning method was valid.

Unexpectedly, might have, surprisingly, and curiously announce unexpected findings that raised questions first in the mind of the author and later, by proxy, in the mind of the reader. In the next sentence the intriguing would appear raises a question. Manual polishing only appears to be the answer, but clearly, the writer has a better, albeit less obvious answer.

What method provides enough contact force to polish the highly complex surfaces of large ship propeller blades? Manual polishing with a belt machine would appear to be the obvious answer.

The not-yet-justified adjectival claim always raises a question, particularly when it is emphasized as in the following sentence:

“The energy landscape/funnel metaphor leads to a very different picture of the folding process than the pathway metaphor.3

In this case, the question is “What does the picture of the folding process look like when we use the energy landscape/funnel metaphor?” The author prompts the reader to ask that question by making the claim before bringing in the evidence. What a marvelous way to recreate suspense!

At high temperatures, electron trapping is not

Electron trapping is unimportant when …

Acting in a manner similar to the adjectival claim, is the negative statement that presents what does not work before what works, what is unimportant before what is important. Starting a statement with what doesn’t, begs the question of what does!

The announcement of change increases tension and attention.

The new strain of Malaria had become resistant to all existing medicine, but this was about to change.

The provocative statement is a trumpet call for justification or clarification. The following statement is as provocative as the title of Thomas Friedman’s book: “The World Is Flat.”

HTML 5 is stillborn.

Certain values in a visual raise strong questions. Yes indeed, what happened on Thursday?

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Antagonistic claims create natural suspense. Observe how the author sustains the interest. In five consecutive sentences, mostly written in the active voice, he brings (1) two numbers, (2) a figure, (3) the attention-getters ’but’, ’not’, and ’important’, (4) an antagonistic claim ’whereas’,contradiction’, and (5) a question suggesting one of the reasons for the observed difference in results.

When trying to improve the clusters obtained by the Clusdex method, Strunfbach et al. reported a 27% increase in error rate when using our annealing method [6], whereas we had observed, not an increase, but a 12% decrease in error as seen Fig. 3. Their findings represented an important contradiction. After examining their data, we discovered that they had used the raw data while we had removed the outliers. Should outliers be kept or removed?

Roadblock. Different methods, different results, and no way to compare them create an impasse.

“As was pointed out (3), it is a challenging task to compare the results of these profiling studies because they used different microarray platforms that were only partially overlapping in gene composition. Notably, the Affymetrix arrays lacked many of the genes on the lymphochip microarrays …”4

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Search your entire paper for the question mark. If you do not have any, ask yourself why? What are the essential questions you are raising and answering in your paper? Shouldn’t you find a way to express them in question form? Do you recreate suspense and raise questions by other means such as roadblocks, provocation, visual questions, negative or adjectival claims?

At the beginning of this chapter, we identified that the structure of a scientific article leaves little room for suspense. The gist of the contribution is revealed immediately in title and abstract, well before the reader reaches the conclusions. Therefore, you, the author, have to reintroduce tension and suspense to sustain interest. Yes, it may feel unnatural; it may also add length to your paper. But the benefits far outweigh the costs. Because attention-getting schemes tend to increase contrast, clarity also increases. More attentive, the reader gets more out of your paper.

In this chapter, we also examined many ways of sustaining the initial attention of motivated readers as they plow through the tough parts of your paper where their attention drains at a fast pace. We used words, punctuation, syntax, text style, page layout, structure, examples, summaries, visuals, and questions. Since the attention of your reader is not deserved but earned through hard work, it is time for you to practice. It is time to wake up the comatose reader with adrenaline-loaded questions. It is also time to pour life-restoring liquid details onto desiccated knowledge.

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Read your paper to identify the parts the reader might find hard to understand (give it to somebody else to read if you are unsure). In these parts, modify your text accordingly to increase attention and facilitate understanding (examples, visual aids, questions, new subheadings, etc.).

Disclaimer: Attention getters are only effective if used sparingly. The author of this book will not be responsible if excessive use of attention-getters in a paper distracts readers and makes them lose focus. Examples of such excessive use include writing ’importantly’ seven times in a long section, turning a paper into a cartoon through over-abundant visuals, using bold and italic in so many places that the paper looks like a primary school paper, or starting three consecutive sentences with ’however’.

1 Reprinted with permission from Dr. Mark Sinclair, PH.D thesis, “Evolutionary Algorithms for optical network design: a genetic-algorithm/heuristic hybrid approach”, ©2001.

2 Reprinted excerpt with permission from Wolynes PG. (2001) Landscapes, Funnels, Glasses, and Folding: From Metaphor to Software. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145: 555—563.

3 Reprinted excerpt with permission from Wolynes PG. (2001) Landscapes, Funnels, Glasses, and Folding: From Metaphor to Software. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 145: 555—563.

4 Wright G, Tan B, Rosenwald A, Hurt E, Wiestner A, Staudt LM. A gene expressionbased method to diagnose clinically distinct subgroups of diffuse large B Cell Lymphoma. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100: 9991—9996.