Page 135 - English for Writing Research Papers

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different from the way we read a printed document. Five years later, Jones studied the
differences between the way that people of different languages, whose scripts are written
left right (e.g. English), right left (e.g. Arabic) and top down (e.g. Japanese), read texts on
the web. The former author then wrote another paper …
By saying the former author you are forcing the reader to go back four or fi ve lines
in order to remember which author you are talking about. By simply saying Smith
then wrote you save the reader time and frustration.

Clearly there are some occasions when using the former and the latter is not
ambiguous:

S5. Water organisms can be contaminated directly or indirectly. The former occurs by contact
or ingestion of the substance dissolved in water, whereas the latter happens when the
contaminant is accumulated in the food chain.

In S5 there is no ambiguity. But S5 would be better written as S6 and would have
more impact:
S6. Water organisms can be contaminated directly or indirectly. Direct contamination occurs
by contact or ingestion of the substance dissolved in water, whereas indirect contamina-
tion happens when the contaminant is accumulated in the food chain.

Specific words ( contamination ) are more readily absorbed and memorable than
generic words ( the former ).
The problem with ambiguity in back-referencing is not just with the former and the
latter . What does Concerning this last topic refer to in S7?

S7. *In recent years, these skills have been applied to the study of heavy metal accumulation
and toxicity in mammalian cells and the modulation of neurotransmitter- gated ion chan-
nels by metal ions in primary neuronal cultures and in recombinant receptors expressed
in heterologous systems. Concerning this last topic, there has been much interest in …

The problem is that the use of and three times makes it initially hard for the reader
to divide up the sentence into different topics. Maybe this last topic refers exclu-
sively to recombinant receptors . However, it might refer to modulation of
neurotransmitter- gated ion channels and recombinant receptors . By simply repeat-
ing the topic, as in S8, the reader can immediately understand what the writer is
referring to.

S8. … and in recombinant receptors expressed in heterologous systems. With regard to such
recombinant receptors, there has been much interest in …