[MUSIC] The key to well-written academic text is it's first few sentences. In particular, the first 7 or 8 words of a sentence. When readers grasp those first 7 or 8 words easily, they read what follows faster, understand it better, and remember it longer. To write good sentences, follow these 5 principles. Avoid introducing more than a few sentences with long phrases and clauses. Get to the subject of your sentence quickly. Make subjects short and concrete, ideally naming the character that performs the action expressed by the verb that follows. Avoid interrupting the subject and the verb with more than a word or two. Put key actions in verbs, not in nouns. Put information familiar to the reader at the beginning of a sentence, and new information at the end of the sentence. Avoid long introductory phrases and clauses. Have a look at the following examples. Most readers find the first sentence harder to read than the second sentence because it makes them work through a 13-word phrase before they reach its subject, eat. In the second sentence, readers immediately start with a subject, these general concepts. The principle is this, start most of your sentences directly with their subject. Begin only a few sentences with introductory phrases or clauses longer than ten or so words. You can usually revise long introductory phrases and subordinate or dependent clauses into separate independent sentences, as in the second sentence. Make subjects short and concrete. Readers must grasp the subject of a sentence easily, but they cannot when the subject is long, complex and abstract. Compare these two sentences. The whole subjects in each are italized and the one word simple subject is bold-faced. In the first sentence, the whole subject is 12-words long, and its simple subject is a nominalised word, adoption. In the second sentence, the whole subject of every verb is short, and each simple subject is relatively concrete, university system, each department head, he or she, and teaching staff. Moreover, each of those subjects performs the action in its verb. System will adopt, department head demonstrates he or she is committed, teaching staff cooperate. This principle is this, readers tend to judge a sentence to be readable when the subject of it's verb names the main character in a few concrete words. Ideally, a character that is the doer of the action expressed by the verb that follows. To fix sentences with long abstract subjects, revise them in 3 steps. Identify the main character in the sentence. Find its key action and if it is nominalised, make it a verb. Make the main character the subject of that new verb. Avoid interrupting subject and verbs with more than a word or two. Avoid splitting a verb from its subject with long phrases and clauses. The noun phrase which contains nine words, separates the subject, scientists, from the verb, are creating, forcing readers to suspend their mental breath. To revise, move the interrupting clause to the beginning or end of the sentence, then you may have this sentence. Put key actions and verbs, not in nouns. Readers want to get to a verb quickly, but they also want that verb to express a key action. So avoid using general purpose or empty verbs such as have, do, make, conduct, perform, carry out to introduce an action smothered by a nominalisation. Make the noun a verb. Compare these sentences. In every crystal, we have the manifestation of a particular state of space. Instead you may say, every crystal manifests a particular state of space. Put information familiar to readers at the beginning of a sentence and new information at the end. Readers understand the sentence most readily when they grasp its subject easily. And the easiest subject to grasp is not just short and concrete, but also familiar. Compare how the second sentence in each of the full-length passages does or does not contribute to a sense of flow. In sentence a, the first words of the second sentence express new information, black holes in space. The collapse of a dead star into a point perhaps no larger than a marble creates. Those words about collapsing stars seem to come out of nowhere. But in sentence b, the first words echo the end of the previous sentence. Black holes in space, a black hole is created. Moreover, once we make that change, the end of that second sentence introduces the third more cohesively. The collapse of a dead start into a point no larger than a marble. So much matter squeezed into so little volume changes. Compared with sentence a at the end of its second sentence, doesn't flow into the beginning of the third sentence as smoothly.
