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

Inverted topic
Set progression tracks for fluid reading
The reading toolkit

We’ve seen that the topic should come upfront in a sentence. What happens when it doesn’t? The topic of the next two sentences is “the cropping”, but it is placed wrongly in the second sentence.

The cropping process should preserve all critical points. Images of the same size should also be produced by the cropping.

These sentences do not seem well balanced. This is because, in the second sentence, the already known information (the cropping) is at the end in a stress position, a place traditionally reserved for new information, whereas the new information is in the place reserved for context. This inversion delays the understanding of the sentence until its topic finally arrives to clarify everything.

Here are three ways to correct the problem:

Change the voice in the sentence from passive to active or vice versa, thus straightening the inverted topic and stress by bringing the known information to the head of the sentence.

The cropping process should preserve all critical points. It should also produce images of the same size.

Invert the order of the sentences to re-establish progression.

Images of the same size should be produced by the cropping. The cropping should also preserve all critical points.

Combine the two sentences into one.

The cropping process should preserve all critical points and maintain the size of images.

Do not invert topic and stress in a sentence.

When the verb that starts the stress is strong, it may overshadow the rest of the stress and override weaker expectations.

Applying Kalman filters reduced the noise in the data sent by the lowcost ultrasonic motion sensors. The reduction was sufficient to bring down the detection error rate below 15%.

Use strong verbs to control expectations.