Page 80 - English for Writing Research Papers

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4.5 Only use a series of short sentences to attract
the reader's attention
You cannot and should not write a whole paper using short sentences.

The series of short sentences in the text below would be considered unsuitable by
most journals.

We investigated the meaning of life. We used four different methodologies. Each methodol-
ogy gave contradictory results. The results confi rmed previous research indicating that we
understand absolutely nothing. Future research will investigate something more simple: the
cerebral life of a PhD student.

The text above consists of four sentences: 6 words, 5, 5, and 11. Such a sequence of
short sentences is the equivalent of traveling in a car with a learner driver over a

bumpy surface – there is no flow and the result is discomfort for the passenger, i.e.
irritation for the reader.

A sequence of short sentences like this would, however, be perfect for highlighting
some important point in the Results or the Discussion or when expressing the key
aims of your research.

4.6 Combine two short sentences into one longer sentence if

this will avoid redundancy
This chapter advocates short sentences over long sentences.

However, two short sentences should be combined into a longer sentence if this will
reduce the amount of redundancy and improve readability.

S1 contains two short sentences, but a lot of redundancy (in italics). S2 combines
the two sentences into one much cleaner sentence.

S1. * On the one hand , companies are increasingly and signifi cantly making use of green
claims in advertising their products (Grün and Verde, 2017). On the other hand , consum-
ers often believe that these claims are not reliable and, because of this, they are not orient-
ing their purchasing decisions towards greener products.
S2. Although companies increasingly make use of green claims in advertising their products
(Grün and Verde, 2017), consumers often believe that these claims are not reliable and
thus do not orient their purchasing decisions towards greener products.

The rest of this chapter explains how to break up longer sentences.