英文科技论文句子的写作
Highlights from Chapter 12 <<Writing Science>> by Joshua Schimel
1.
You can’t write strong papers with weak sentences. To polish your writing, you need to go back to basics. That means sentences.
A sentence has a subject, verb, and object. To transform a sentence into a story, you need to see those grammatical units as OCAR functions.
O-Opening: who is the story about? = Subject
C-Challenge/action: what happened = Verb
R-Resolution: what was its outcome? = Object
2.
Opening: The Topic
Whatever you put at the beginning of a sentence, readers interpret as the topic: who or what the sentence is about.
3.
Resolution: The Stress
Endings are always power positions — last words carry the greatest weight.
Use the power of the stress by putting keywords there — the main message and new ideas or terms.
4.
Putting topic and stress together
You must put the right information in the right place.
The weighting of words in a sentence follows a consistent order: the stress carries the greatest emphasis, the topic is next, and the middle carries the least.
5.
Subject-verb Connection
Managing topics and stress is about managing opening and resolution. Writing strong sentences also requires managing the action.
The verb (the action) should immediately follow the sentence’s subject.
6.
Managing real sentences
The key to writing complex sentences is holding their structure together. Topic, action, and stress need to be well chosen and well placed.
1) Pick the right topic
When we add words or clauses to the beginning of a sentence, we bury the topic and risk that it will be missed or misconstrued. Tightening the structure means picking the right topic.
No: It has been predicted that the global average temperature will increase at a rate of X˚C/decade.
Yes: Global average temperature has been predicted to increase at a rate of X˚C/ decade.
2) Unburying the stress
Sometimes the problem is that there are words dangling after the stress. To strengthen such sentences, you need to either delete those extra words or move them into the middle of the sentence, thereby shifting the important words into the stress position.
3) guidelines to fix a long sentence when the topic and stress are buried.
(1) The topic should be short and clear.
(2) The main verb should follow it immediately.
(3) The key message should come from the stress.
7.
Long sentences
Good, clear sentences can be short or long, and the best writers use a mixture of both. The key to writing a good long sentence is holding together the structure.
To write a good long sentence, you need to use an LD structure: make the key point in a short initial main clause, and then add others that add depth and nuance.
Even though we lean toward short sentences in science writing, it’s a useful skill to be able to craft a clean long one.
Get to the topic quickly, then to the action, and then add nuance if needed.
8.
The secret to writing strong sentences is the same as for writing strong papers and paragraphs:
- Make the OCAR elements clear and put them in the right places.
- Develop story elements into coherent arcs placed in series.
- Find the topic, make it the subject, and move it toward the beginning of the sentence.
- Find the action verb and connect it closely to the subject.
- Find the stress and move it to the end of the main clause.