Page 71 - English for Writing Research Papers

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3.17 How to structure a paragraph: an example

In the early 1960s, senior staff scientist at NASA, Sam Katzoff wrote a 30-page
pamphlet entitled ‘Clarity in Technical Reporting’. This short document was
designed to help his colleagues at NASA to write clearly and to think of better ways
to express themselves. His pamphlet is still being read – not just by NASA scien-
tists – but all over the English-speaking world. It is a truly great introduction to
writing skills, for native and non-native speakers alike.

I am now going to analyze how Katzoff writes the fi rst paragraph at the beginning
of a section entitled ‘Organization of a Technical Report’.
Different writers have different methods of organizing their reports, and some seem to have
no discernible method at all. Most of the better writers, however, appear to be in remarkably
close agreement as to the general approach to organization. This approach consists of stat-
ing the problem, describing the method of attack, developing the results, discussing the
results, and summarizing the conclusions. You may feel that this type of organization is
obvious, logical, and natural. Nevertheless, it is not universally accepted. For example,
many writers present results and conclusions near the beginning, and describe the deriva-
tion of these results in subsequent sections.

Let’s begin with some statistics.

words, sentences, punctuation repetitions of key words
Total words = 101 approach 2
Total sentences = 6 method 3
Average words per sentence = 16.8 organization 3
Longest sentence = 22 words results 4
Shortest sentence = 6 words writer 3
Full stops (.) = 6
Commas (,) = 10
Semicolons (;) = 0

If you analyzed a paragraph in a typical research paper, you would very likely get
very different data. Try looking at some of your own work. With respect to Katzoff’s
paragraph, you will probably notice a big increase in the number of words, commas
and semicolons per sentence. The typical sentence length will be around 30–40
words, but also up to 70–80. I imagine there will also be a considerable decrease
both in the number of full stops and in repetitions of key words.