Page 134 - English for Writing Research Papers

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If you have done some tests and you want to say what these tests have shown then
you should not say:

S8. Tests have shown that cell phones can cause cancer.

S8 indicates that some tests, not carried out by the author, have shown that cell
phones can cause cancer. It would be better to write 'the tests', thus referring the
reader back to the tests described earlier in the paragraph / section. Even better
would be 'our tests'.
Similarly, if you only carried out one test for your research, you should not write:

S9. One test revealed that cell phones can cause cancer.

S9 implies that you carried out several tests, and the reader would probably under-
stand that one test revealed cancer but another one (or two or three etc) did not.

6.17 Referring backwards: the dangers of the former,
the latter
When you refer back to something you mentioned before, it is often not immedi-
ately clear what the former and the latter refer to.
S1. *Africa has a greater population than the combined populations of Russia, Canada and
the United States. In the latter , the population is only …
In S1 does the latter refer just to the US alone, or to the US and Canada? The sim-
plest and clearest solution is to replace the latter with the exact word or words it
refers to. This gives:
S2. Africa has a greater population than the combined populations of Russia, Canada and the
United States. In the USA the population is only …
S3. Africa has a greater population than the combined populations of Russia, Canada and the
United States. In Canada and the USA, the population is only …

It is not a problem to repeat words if the result is that the reader will be clear about
what you want to say. This is particularly true if the word that the former / the latter
refers to is some distance away. For example:

S4. *Smith was the first to introduce the concept of readability in websites. In his seminal
paper, written in 1991, he realized that the way we read pages on the web is totally