Page 157 - English for Writing Research Papers

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8.1 What's the buzz?

1) Are you guilty of the faults identified by these two referees?
Given that the focus of this paper is on an ‘innovative methodology’, the author needs to
make more effort to clarify what makes his / her approach special. I truly believe that the
author is making a useful contribution but I reached that conclusion only by reading
between the lines
.
I have the strong feeling that the authors have overstated the achievements and the signifi -
cance of their project, and thus may be guilty of bias. I recommend that they check all their
data again to ensure that their conclusions are valid for all the results they obtained, rather
than just a subset of them.

2) What ways can you think of to highlight your findings?
************
Your findings may be extremely valid and important. However, if the referees are

not able to see or understand your findings because you have neither highlighted nor

described them clearly enough, then your paper may not be published. Your contri-
bution to the community may thus vanish into oblivion.

In the words of English botanist, Sir Francis Darwin: In science the credit goes to
the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea fi rst occurred.

Sections 8.3 to 8.9 outline how to use visual techniques (i.e. layout and sentence /
paragraph length, bullets, headings, sentence length) to make readers notice your

key findings. Sections 8.10 to 8.17 discuss the importance of the use of language to
attract reader's attention.

8.2 Show your paper to a non-expert and get him / her
to underline your key fi ndings
A great way of discovering how explicit you have been in presenting your key fi nd-
ings is to show a non-expert your paper. Ask them to underline where they think you
have introduced / discussed your key findings. This task should be possible even for

someone who knows very little about your topic. If they fail to underline your key
findings, then you know that you need to highlight your key findings even more.

If you want to be more thorough, you could get the same person also to fi nd places
where you discuss the implications and limitations of your research – along with
your findings these two are key elements that should stand out clearly for the reader.