Concise technical writing: How many ideas per sentence? transcript

hello scientific writers welcome to the next lesson this lesson is on being concise the title of the lesson is keep your reader awake and alert with concise writing so awaken alert what am i talking about here well if your writing is too long the reader is going to get bogged down what is concise concise is as short as it can possibly be while not losing any meaning or content if your writing is longer than it needs to be that's extra work for the reader and they're going to get tired they're not going to be alert and eventually you might put them to sleep being too long not concise takes away from clarity takes away from readability and comprehension and all of these things that we've been working on in this course so we want our writing to be concise readers prefer concise so give the readers what they want and what they need to read your work so it can have impact let's begin by looking at the learning objectives for this lesson after this lesson you'll be able to recognize common writing problems that add length you'll be able to edit those common problems to achieve conciseness and you'll also be able to omit text that does not need to be included so here's our list of things that we're going to focus on in this lesson it's a list of 10 items and i'll have some examples for you for most of these items although not for every single one of them the first thing we'll focus on is how to keep sentences short and with one idea per sentence we'll look at nominalizations and how to use active voice and active verbs instead of nominalizations we'll look at meta discourse and overview sentences statements of the obvious or unnecessary explanation unnecessary words and phrases unnecessary complexity wordiness and circumlocution we'll look at using as well as has beens and inclusion of irrelevant material and lastly we'll look at weasel words or equivocation so let's get started on this lesson and we'll get started by looking at the first topic and that is keep sentences short and with one idea so we already mentioned this concept in an earlier lesson but it's one that's so important i thought i would like to bring it back and talk about it specifically again in this final lesson let's look at an example of a sentence that is too long and or has more than one idea the sentence says plant growth requires a source of nitrogen for the biosynthesis of amino acids nucleic acids and other nitrogen-containing bile molecules and insufficient nitrogen reduces the productivity and quality of crops so that's clearly two ideas so one is what the nitrogen is required for and the second idea is the consequence of insufficient nitrogen two ideas it should be two sentences and this one is simple because they have this and conjunction and we can just place replace that with the period and make it two sentences as you see in the revision so none of the words have changed except that we took out the word and and we substituted a period for the comma in that first clause which becomes the first independent sentence so that first example was an easy one let's look at one that's not quite as easy so here's a sentence that is 45 words long so it's too long we need to think about what this sentence means so let's take a look at it it says since the sizes and locations of plant available nutrient pools in soils are often highly variable and conditions for nutrient uptake which are influenced by drought oxygen depletion etc are rarely optimal during a whole vegetarian vegetation period transient nutrient deficiencies must be expected to occur frequently so the questions i ask myself are what is the sentence about and once i figure that out does the sentence convey the intended idea as the subject of the sentence so when i start thinking about this sentence and i read it again i think that the main message to the reader is this part that is underlined and in italics in in parentheses transient nutrient deficiencies must be expected to occur frequently that's really what the sentence is about so all the rest of the sentence is adding additional information which may or may not be useful or necessary to get the point across so how would i suggest the authors to revise this sentence i would move what the sentence is about to the beginning so that's the topic position of a sentence i would also break it up so the first sentence would have the main idea short term nutrient deficiencies are expected to occur frequently okay that's the opening phrase and i've changed must be to r and i've changed transient to short term so i've simplified some of the language we'll continue reading the sentence short term nutrient deficiencies are expected to occur frequently since the sizes and locations of plant available nutrient pools and soils are often highly variable so the second part of that sentence is explaining why the nutrient deficiencies are expected to occur frequently now i make a second sentence that says also nutrient uptake conditions are rarely optimal during a whole life cycle and are influenced by factors such as drought and oxygen depletion so i changed vegetation period to life cycle and i don't like that use of etc in the first sentence so i don't think scientific writing should use etc if you're going to have a list of ideas either make a complete list or indicate that the list is partial with such as now we have two sentences the first one is 23 words the second one is 20 words we're meeting our target goal to get to sentences with an average of 22 or fewer words and we've also got one idea per sentence let's take a look at another example of a sentence that has more than one idea so this 46 word sentence says among these approaches target gene editing in which nucleotide variation is introduced at an appointed site and the target mutations are obtained accurately and efficiently thereby speeding up the functional identification of target genes and genetic breeding improvement is an ideal method for artificially inducing mutations we have a sentence that has two interrupting phrases between the subject and the verb so the subject is target gene editing and the verb is is targeting editing is an ideal method that's what they're trying to tell us but we have these two phrases the first one is defining target gene editing and the second phrase is discussing the benefits of target gene editing and they're both interrupting between the subject and the verb and so we have really three different ideas happening in this sentence one is that target gene editing is an ideal method and secondly what is target gene editing and thirdly the benefits of target gene editing three different ideas so what i would suggest to these authors is to revise the sentence like this i would make it three different sentences and these are going to result in sentences lengths of 14 words 21 words and 17 words among these approaches target gene editing is an ideal method for artificially inducing mutations with target gene editing nucleotide variation is introduced at an appointed site and the target mutations are obtained accurately in efficiency this process speeds up the functional identification of target genes and thereby speeds up genetic breeding improvement so now we have three sentences for the three ideas so each sentence is a lot more concise you