Page 59 - English for Writing Research Papers

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3.6 Deciding where to put new and old information
within a paragraph
Known information is traditionally placed at the beginning of a sentence or para-
graph. Below are the first three sentences from the abstract of a fi ctitious paper

entitled ‘Readability and Non-Native English Speakers’ intended for a journal dedi-
cated to communication in the world of business.

version i Readability formulas calculate how readable a text is by determining the level of
difficulty of each individual word and the length of sentences. All types of writers can use

these formulas in order to understand how difficult or readable their texts would be for the

average reader. However, readability formulas are based purely on what is considered dif-

ficult for a native English speaker, and do not take into account problems that may be
encountered by non-natives. In this paper…

The first word, readability , is one of the author’s key words. It immediately alerts
the reader to the topic of the sentence and of the abstract (and paper) as a whole.
However, the information contained in it is not new – readability formulas and their
indexes are well established in the literature on business communication.

The role of the first two sentences is thus to set the context and gently guide the

reader into the paragraph. The third sentence then introduces the new element, i.e.
the fact that readability indexes do not take into account non-native speakers. The
third sentence thus highlights the problem that the paper intends to tackle.

However, the abstract could have begun like this:

version 2 Current readability formulas are based purely on what is considered diffi cult for
a native English speaker. They fail to take into account problems that may be encountered
by non-natives. One thousand five hundred PhD students from 10 countries were asked to

evaluate the difficulty of five technical texts from their business discipline written by native
English speakers. Three key difficulties were found: unfamiliar vocabulary (typically Anglo-

Saxon words), unfamiliar cultural references, and the use of humor. The paper also proposes
a new approach to assessing the level of readability of texts to account for such diffi culties.
In Version 2, the author still begins with his key word, readability . But he precedes it
with current , which signals to the reader that the author will then probably propose an
alternative. The author also assumes that his readers will be aware of what a readabil-
ity formula is, so he feels he doesn’t need to mention it. Thus, in the second sentence
he immediately underlines a critical problem with current formulas. In the third sen-
tence he then tells his readers what his research was and then what was found.
Version 3, below, contains only new information.

version 3 Unfamiliar vocabulary (typically Anglo-Saxon words), unfamiliar cultural ref-
erences, and the use of humor: these, according to our survey of 1500 PhD students, are
the main difficulties non-native speakers have when reading a business text in English. Our

results highlight the need to adjust current readability formulas in order to take non-native