Page 52 - English for Writing Research Papers

Chapter 3

Structuring Paragraphs

Factoids

The results of two research projects – the Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack survey,
and an analysis by Jakob Nielsen (a Danish web usability expert) – show that
only half of readers who begin an article, will actually finish it, and if the

article is read online, only a fifth of readers will fi nish it.

*****
Nobel Prize Winner in Physics, Tony Leggett, notes that "in Japanese it seems
that it is often legitimate to state a number of thoughts in such a way that the
connection between them, or the meaning of any given one, only becomes
clear when one has read the whole paragraph or even the whole paper." This
is not the case in what is considered good written English, where the meaning
should become clear very quickly.
*****
Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, noted
that after a conversation with some of her students she discovered that “most
can’t concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a
time. We’re being trained away from slow reading by new technology.”

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 33
A. Wallwork, English for Writing Research Papers,
English for Academic Research, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5_3