Page 123 - English for Writing Research Papers

105

A common mistake by authors is in making assumptions about what the reader will
understand. This is because you as the author know your topic extremely well, in
fact you may have been working on it for several months, even years. This means
that you may use words and expressions which to you are clear, but to the reader
may not be. Below are a few examples of words and expressions that could be
interpreted in many different ways. In all cases you need to be more specifi c:

in the short term, in the near future

a relatively short / long duration

[quite a] high / low number of

recently, recent – bear in mind that the reader may be reading your paper several years after its
publication

Referees often criticize authors for sentences such as:

S1. Usually the samples were cooled to room temperature.
S2. It was necessary to study the problem with attention .
S3. In the late 1990s nearly all newspapers created a companion website.
S4. Subjects performed fairly well and their results were substantially better than their
counterparts.

S1: If you use adverbs such as usually and normally when referring to experiments
or results then the reader might want to know what happens or happened in other
cases.

S2: What exactly does attention mean? It may be useful to provide details regarding
the level of attention and what it entailed.

S3: This was the fi rst sentence in an abstract analyzing online newspapers in Italy.
It is not clear whether this is a general statement about newspapers in all the world,
or just in Italy. This is a classic case of when the author knows what he / she is refer-
ring to, but the reader is left in doubt.

S4: Adverbs such as fairly and substantially mean different things to different
people. Other examples of potentially ambiguous adjectives and adverbs are: ade-
quate, appreciable, appropriate, comparatively, considerable, practically, quite,
rather, real, relatively, several, somewhat, suitable, tentative , and very . These
adjectives and adverbs do not have a single unequivocal meaning. They can be open
to interpretation by the reader. Often they are redundant or need to be made more
precise.