Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to American Scientist.
http://www.jstor.org
is often hard to read. Most people assume that its threeminutes and records a listof temperatures. Those
difficulties are born out of necessity, out of the extreme
Science data could be presented by a number ofwritten structures.
complexity of scientific concepts, data and analysis. We ar? Here are two possibilities:
gue here that complexity of thought need not lead to im? t (time) - 15', T (temperature) = 32?; f= 0', T = 25?;
penetrability of expression; we demonstrate a number of t= 6',T = 29?; t= 3', T= 27?; t=12\ T = 32?; t= 9',T = 31?
rhetorical principles that can produce clarity in communi?
cation without oversimplifying scientific issues. The re? time (min) temperature (?C)
sults are substantive, not merely cosmetic: Improving the 0 25
quality ofwriting actually improves the quality of thought. 3 27
The fundamental purpose of scientific discourse is not 6 29
themere presentation of information and thought, but 9 31
rather its actual communication. Itdoes not matter how 12 32
an author might be to have converted all the 15 32
pleased right
data into sentences and paragraphs; itmatters only
whether a largemajority of the reading audience accurate? Precisely the same information appears in both formats,
lyperceives what the author had inmind. Therefore, in or? yetmost readers find the second easier to interpret. Itmay
der to understand how best to improve writing, we would be that the very familiarity of the tabular structuremakes
do well to understand better how readers go about read? it easier to use. But, more significantly, the structure of the
second table provides the reader with an easily perceived
ing. Such an understanding has recently become available
context (time) inwhich the significant piece of information
throughwork done in the fields of rhetoric, linguistics and
cognitive psychology. Ithas helped to produce a method? (temperature) can be interpreted. The contextual material
ology based on the concept of reader expectations. appears on the left in a pattern that produces an expecta?
tion of regularity; the interesting results appear on the
Writing with theReader inMind: Expectation and Context right in a less obvious pattern, the discovery ofwhich is
Readers do not simply read; they interpret.Any piece of the point of the table.
If the two sides of this simple table are reversed, itbe?
prose, no matter how short,may "mean" in 10 (ormore)
differentways to 10 different readers. This methodology of comes much harder to read.
reader expectations is founded on the recognition that time (min)
temperature (?C)
readers make many of theirmost important interpretive 25 0
decisions about the substance of prose based on clues they 27 3
receive from its structure. 29 6
This interplay between substance and structure can be 31 9
demonstrated by something as basic as a simple table. Let 32 12
us say that in tracking the temperature of a liquid over a 32 15
an investigator takesmeasurements every
period of time,
Since we read from left to right,we prefer the context on
the left,where it can more effectively familiarize the
George D. Gopen is associate professor of English and Director ofWriting
a reader.We prefer the new, important information on the
Programs at D?ke University. He holds Ph.D. in English from Harvard
University and a
J.D.from Harvard Law School JudithA. Swan teaches sci? right, since its job is to intrigue the reader.
Information is interpretedmore easily and more uni?
entificwriting at Princeton University. Her Ph.D., which is in biochemistry,
was earned at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Address for Gopen: formly if it is placed where most readers expect to find it.
307 Allen Building, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706. These needs and expectations of readers affect the inter
The smallest of theURF's isURFA6L, a 207-nucleo emphasize this imposter material, and thewriter will have
lost an important opportunity to influence the reader's in?
tide (nt) reading frame overlapping out of phase the
terpretive process.
NH2-terminal portion of the adenosinetriphosphatase The stress position can change in size from sentence to
(ATPase) subunit 6 gene; ithas been identified as the
sentence. Sometimes it consists of a single word; some?
animal equivalent of the recently discovered yeast H+
ATPase subunit 8 gene. times it extends to several lines. The definitive factor is
this:The stress position coincides with themoment of syn?
On the other hand, the intervening material might be a tactic closure. A reader has reached the beginning of the
mere aside thatdiverts attention frommore important ideas; stress position when she knows there is nothing left in the
in that case thewriter should have deleted it,allowing the clause or sentence but thematerial presently being read.
prose to drive more directly toward its significant point: Thus a whole list,numbered and indented, can occupy the
stress position of a sentence if ithas been clearly an?
The smallest of theURF's (URFA6L) has been identi?
nounced as being all that remains of that sentence. Each
fied as the animal equivalent of the recently discovered
member of that list, in turn,may have its own internal
yeast H+-ATPase subunit 8 gene. stress position, since each member may produce its own
Only the author could tell us which of these revisions syntactic closure.
more accurately reflects his intentions. Within a sentence, secondary stress positions can be
After encountering the subject ("experiments"), the reader by six human URF's (URF1, URF2, URF3, URF4, URF4L,
and URF5); these URF's will be referred to subsequently
must wade through 27 words (including three hyphenated
as ND1, ND2, ND3, ND4, ND4L, and ND5.
compound words, a parenthetical interruption and an "as
well as" phrase) before alighting on the highly uninforma? Sheer lengthwas neither the problem nor the solution.
tive and disappointingly anticlimactic verb ("have indicat? The revised version is not noticeably shorter than the origi?
ed"). Without a moment to recover, the reader is handed a nal; nevertheless, it is significantly easier to interpret.We
"that" clause inwhich the new subject ("six human have indeed deleted certain words, but not on the basis of
URF's") is separated from itsverb ("encode") by yet an? wordiness or excess length. (See especially the last sen?
other 20 words. tence of our revision.)
Ifwe applied the three principles we have developed to When is a sentence too long? The creators of readability
the rest of the sentences of the example, we could generate formulas would have us believe there exists some fixed
a great many revised versions of each. These revisions number ofwords (the favorite is 29) past which a sentence
might differ significantly from one another in theway is too hard to read.We disagree. We have seen 10-word
their structures indicate to the reader the various weights sentences that are virtually impenetrable and, as we men?
and balances to be given to the information. Had the au? tioned above, 100-word sentences that flow effortlessly to
thorplaced all stress-worthy material in stress positions, theirpoints of resolution. In place of theword-limit con?
we as a reading community would have been farmore cept,we offer the following definition: A sentence is too
likely to interpret these sentences uniformly. longwhen ithas more viable candidates for stress posi?
We couch this discussion in terms of "likelihood" be? tions than there are stress positions available. Without the
cause we believe thatmeaning is not inherent in discourse stress position's locational clue that itsmaterial is intended
by itself; "meaning" requires the combined participation of to be emphasized, readers are left toomuch to their own
text and reader. All sentences are infinitely interpretable, devices in deciding justwhat else in a sentence might be
given an infinitenumber of interpreters.As communities considered important.
of readers, however, we tend towork out tacit agreements In revising the example passage, we made certain deci?
as towhat kinds ofmeaning are most likely to be extracted sions about what to omit and what to emphasize. We put
tern in all other documents. But for the very reason that Writing inNon-Academic Settings, eds. Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami.
Guilford Press, pp. 87-128.
writers tend to be consistent inmaking such choices, they
course of business
can learn to improve theirwriting style; they can perma? Gopen, George D. 1987. Let the buyer in ordinary
beware: suggestions for revising the language of the Uniform
nently reverse those habitual structural decisions thatmis? Commercial Code. University ofChicago Law Review 54:1178-1214.
lead or burden readers. Gopen, George D. 1990. The Common Sense ofWriting: Teaching Writing
We have argued that the substance of thought and the from theReaders Perspective. To be published.