Page 167 - English for Writing Research Papers

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Marchesi and colleagues. The fact that the authors had found another Z in a different
location was the fundamental fi nding of their whole paper. But they presented this
information in the same way as they reported the general state of the art in their
introduction. After their paper had been initially rejected, they rewrote the sentence
as in S2.

S2. Since Z has only ever been found in Region 1 (Marchesi et al ., 2009), we were surprised to
identify Z in Region 2 as well. Our discovery suggests the presence of an unidentifi ed
transcriptor factor that …

S2 focuses on the key fi nding (i.e. Z). Z is now placed at the beginning of the sen-

tence. How they made this finding has already been described in the Results (i.e.
through a comparison of X and Y ), so they don’t really need to mention X and Y here
too. They use much more emotive language – surprised, discovery, unidentified –

which is designed to draw the reader’s attention to the importance and contribution
of their work.

Here is an example from the Abstract of a paper on cow’s milk.

S3. *In this study, we set up a system to quantify the level of X in milk, relying on a particular
kind of pre-treatment allowing a low dilution of the sample.
S4. In this study, we set up a system to quantify the level of X in milk. Our method is highly
effective and less expensive than other options currently available. In fact, it uses a special
pre-treatment, which means that the sample only requires a minimal level of dilution.

S4 is much more effective in conveying the validity and utility of the author’s sys-
tem. It does this by:

• splitting the long sentence of S3 into two shorter sentences

• making a comparison with previous methods

• using clearer language to highlight the implications of the pre-treatment