192  Vary Sentence Length

Scientific Writing is Cohesive — Transitions {#cohesiveTransitions}

In the last chapter we saw how to construct sentences. We also noted that shorter is better, as echoed in the principle of being concise. In general, longer sentences are more difficult to understand — they are also more difficult to follow. When sentence lengths increase, the readability of articles suffers. For scientific articles, which are often not very readable, the average sentence length is more than 30 words. For newspaper articles, which are highly readable, it is only 15-20 words. Aim for an average sentence length of about 20 words.

Short single-clause sentences have more impact. Readers assign more importance to short stand-alone sentences and less importance to long sentences of secondary clauses, which are dependent on a main clause.

Break up Long Sentences

This sentence only has 42 words. Nonetheless, it can overwhelm the reader with too much information.

👎 Genetic modification of plant foods, including already-available staples such as soybean, maize and rice, is used to express novel and desirable traits by introducing specific, naturally-occurring or synthetic genetic-material, thereby offering some advantage for the producer or the consumer over conventional crops. (42 words)

There are three points the author is trying to make: - GM plants are already available. - The goal of GM. - How the goal is achieved.

Each point is stated in an individual sentence in the revision.

👍 Many genetically-modified plants, including staples such as soybean, maize and rice, are already available to consumers. (16 words) words_Genetic modification attempts to express novel and desirable traits, which offer an advantage for the producer or the consumer over conventional crops. (22) This goal is achieved by introducing specific, naturally-occurring or synthetic genetic material, into different species of plants. (17, 55 total)

Combining sentences can help you link two pieces of information together more closely than if they were in separate sentences. It can also aid you in reducing word count, which is particularly important in the Abstract.

Combining Sentences

In this case, the experiment’s rationale and the method are combined in one sentence.

👎 We asked whether … . To answer this question, we analysed …

👍 To determine whether …, we analysed …

By combining these two sentences the word count has been reduced by 7 words.

👎 We studied pulmonary artery pressure over the course of 3 hours. We found that pulmonary artery pressure rose to 150% of baseline and remained elevated throughout the experiment. (28 words)

👍 We found that pulmonary artery pressure rose to 150% of baseline and remained elevated for the 3-hour duration of the experiment. (21 words)

Start paragraphs and sections with shorter sentences to highlight the main topic of the paragraph/section. The final sentence of a paragraph is also usually short. Intervening sentences in the paragraph are longer.

By varying sentence length, you can hold the reader’s interest. Paragraphs with variable sentence lengths are easier to understand because they mimic speech patterns.

192.1 Dividing up long sentences

In the simplest case scenario you can split up sentences using punctuation alone. However, there are many ways to deal with very long sentences. Re-write each of the following into shorter sentences.

Using automatic translation software (e.g. Google Translate, Babelfish, and Systran) can considerably ease the work of researchers when they need to translate documents thus saving them money (for example the fee they might have otherwise had to pay to a professional translator) and increasing the amount of time they have to spend in the laboratory rather than at the computer. (60 words)

In order to establish a relationship between document length and level of bureaucracy in European countries and to confirm whether documents, such as reports regarding legislative and administrative issues, vary substantially in length from one language to another, we conducted an analysis of A, B and C. (47 words)

The aim of our study was to assess changes in the level of tolerance of natives of one country towards immigrants over the course of a 50-year period in order to be able to advise governmental agencies on how to develop strategies based on those countries that have been more successful in reducing racism as already investigated in previous studies, but not in such a systematic way, and to establish correlations with data from the USA, which until now have been reported only sporadically. (84 words)

Monolithic sorbent tip technology has proved to be efficient in removing interferences from copper and mercury salts, but it has not been tested for other materials and the recovery of proteinaceous material is often too small, giving rise to analysis problems. (41 words)

Our results show that the performance of the system, in terms of throughput and delay, depends on several factors including the frame duration, the mechanisms for requesting uplink bandwidth, the load partitioning, i.e. the way traffic is distributed, connections, and traffic sources within each connection. (45 words)