Page 277 - English for Writing Research Papers

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The RV is approximately half the length of the OV, 45 words rather than 84. This is
achieved by:

• deleting unnecessary sentences. Some journals and reviewers advise that
there is no need to have an initial sentence saying The paper is structured as
follows. Simply beginning a new paragraph at the end of the Introduction is
enough to alert the reader that you are now going to talk about the structure

• using active verbs ( surveys ) rather than only passive ( a survey … is provided ).

For the sake of variety, the RV also includes some passive forms. But you
could, if you wish, use active forms throughout and this would further reduce
the length of the paragraph

• removing other redundancy. For example, the phrase the experience in the

application of the tool to industrial case studies is reported and discussed is
unnecessarily verbose

• remove the obvious - most papers end with a concluding section (Section 7 in

the OV), you don't need to mention this

Note that the word section, when accompanied by a number, should have the initial
s capitalized. Examples:

S1. This is covered in Section 4.
S2. More details will be given later in this section .