Page 250 - English for Writing Research Papers

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13.19 Why and how should I be concise?

Below are the first sentences from two different abstracts. How do you think the
reviewers reacted when reading them?
S1. Tomato ( Solanum lycopersicum L .) is a worldwide-cultivated vegetable crop which is
affected by many viruses that cause significant economic losses whose detection and

identification is of critical importance to plant virologists in general and, in particular, to
scientists and others involved in plant protection activities and quarantine and certifi ca-
tion programs.
S2. In this paper a high performance "pattern matching" system is presented. The system is
based on the concept of Recalled Association (RA), designed to solve the track-fi nding
problem typical of high energy physics experiments executed in hadron colliders. It is
powerful enough to process data produced from 90 overlapping proton-proton collisions.

The paper that contained S1 was rejected, the author was informed that 'the paper
must be rewritten completely'. The reviewer gave an example of what kind of
'rewriting' was required – basically he wanted all the redundancy removed (he man-
aged to remove 40% of what the author had written!):

S3. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) is affected by many viruses that cause signifi cant
economic losses. Their detection and identification is of critical importance in plant pro-

tection and quarantine, and in certifi cation programs.
Moral of the story:

• If the reader or reviewer sees a lot of redundancy in the abstract, then he/she
will probably stop reading.

• In your abstract every word must add VALUE.
In addition to being heavily redundant, S1 contains one long 50-word sentence. S2
has the same number of words as S1 but contains three sentences. You might thus
think that S2 escaped the reviewer's wrath (anger). The problem is that S2, like S1,
contains a lot of redundancy which massively reduces its impact and thus immedi-
ately diminishes the reader's desire to continue reading. A better version would be:

S4. A high performance pattern matching system based on Recalled Association is presented.

It solves the track-finding problem, which is typical of high energy physics experiments
in hadron colliders. It can process data produced from 90 overlapping proton-proton
collisions.
S4 is about 20% shorter than the original S2, but no information has been lost. It
also puts the key information right at the beginning of the fi rst sentence.