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

Topic and stress
Set progression tracks for fluid reading
The reading toolkit

Giant George

I am very much indebted to Dr. George Gopen. His book “Expectations: Teaching Writing from The Reader’s Perspective” introduced me to sentence progression schemes built around the concept of topic and stress. To demonstrate the power of Dr. Gopen’s impact on my writing, I need to reveal this somewhat embarrassing personal story.

Back in 2002, I rewrote a convoluted paragraph from a Ph.D thesis. It was beautifully rewritten: clear, concise. The students in my class were in awe. What I had not told them was that the rewriting had taken me close to one hour and twenty minutes of solid work involving many drafts. Naturally, they all wanted to know what technique I had used to rewrite such a masterpiece, but all I could do was wave hands and claim that when you “feel” something is still not right, you go on to the next draft. That was true, of course, but not encouraging to the students because my response meant that if they did not have that feeling, there was no hope for them. Writing was a natural talent, not a science.

Looking back to what happened then, I realize how much ground I have covered. Not only can I rewrite the same paragraph in less than twenty minutes, but I can also explain how to apply the progression technique to any paragraph.

When readers cruise down your paper in fifth gear, it is because you have created a highway for their thoughts to travel on at great speed, a highway that stops their mind from wandering where it should not go. Sometimes, while reading certain papers, I feel as if I am driving in the fog at a crawling speed across a muddy field, trying to follow somebody else’s tracks. In Science, unlike literature, you guide your readers along a clearly lit well-signposted highway. How to build such a highway is described in one word: progression.

Progression is the process of transforming what is new into what is known. It builds a coherent context that allows readers to travel light and read on with minimum cognitive baggage. When readers start a sentence, a paragraph, or a section in your paper, they relate what they read to what they know. This progressive anchoring of new knowledge onto old knowledge is an essential learning mechanism.

The reader may wonder if there is a connection between expectation and progression. Sometimes they are joined and work in synergy. For example, when a sentence starts with first, it sets the expectation that the following sentences will cover what comes after; the sequential progression fulfills the expectation. Sometimes expectation and progression are distinct and work separately, hopefully in the same direction. It does happen that they pull the reader in different directions, which is not advisable, of course. Progression should always support the expectation, not the opposite.

There are other differences between the two. Expectations have a longer reach. For example, a question’s reach extends far beyond the next sentence. Progression is purely local: between two phrases within a sentence, two sentences within a paragraph, or two paragraphs within a section. Expectations open the reader’s mind. Progression keeps the reader’s mind on your rails.

But before we dive into progression schemes, we must first revisit some grammar. In France, schoolchildren discover all about topic and stress (in French Thème et Propos) in their grammar book at the age of 14. By the time they go to university, they have forgotten all about them! The same probably applies to you, so here is a quick refresher course.

Topic and stress

“Mr. Johnson hurriedly chased his neighbour’s dog out the front door”.

This sentence contains three elements: a man named Johnson, a dog, and a door. If I were to ask you who or what this sentence was about, you would instinctively (and correctly answer) “the man, Mr. Johnson”. Indeed it’s his story — he is the topic of the sentence, positioned upfront, and the doer of the verb “chased”.

Imagine I instead change the sentence to:

“The neighbour’s dog sneaked into Mr. Johnson’s house, but it wasn’t long before the man hurriedly chased him out through the front door.”

The topic of the sentence is now the dog — it is now the dog’s story, and Johnson is a secondary actor.

Finally, compare both of the previous sentences to this one:

“The front door to Mr. Johnson’s house burst open, the neighbour’s dog running out quickly, Mr. Johnson right on its tail.”

Despite containing roughly the same information, all three sentences are read from different perspectives, because they have different topics. The topic should always be placed upfront in a sentence. Anything that is not the topic is called the stress. Typically, the stress starts at the first verb and finishes the sentence.

| Topic > The neighbour’s dog

| Stress > sneaked into Mr. Johnson’s house […] front door.

The topic establishes the main subject of the sentence, and the stress details what happens to that subject.

To identify a topic, evaluate whether what it describes is known and is at the beginning of a sentence. The stress is new to the reader.