Archives

Writing guru, fledgling medical editor, former freshman comp teacher, and Edge blogger Rebecca Helton offers bite-sized tips to improve your writing. Small adjustments can make big differences in clarity and style. We’ve rounded up links to the related posts below:

Correcting Comparisons

“Compared to” can’t replace the simpler, clearer “than.” Here’s why.

Comprise vs. Compose

“Comprised of” should never exist in formal writing. Learn how to use the comprise/compose pair accurately.

Don’t Dangle Your Modifiers Off a Cliff

Modifiers provide important detail, but can easily wander off the cliff when used incorrectly. See examples of dangling and secure modifiers.

Energize Your Words with Active Voice

The use of active voice improves even science writing. Sentences get shorter, actions clearer, and the reader more engaged.

Readability Scores

Tips for improving the readability of your writing for all audiences.

Additional Resources:

Writing in Academia: An Interview with Helen Sword

Practical Writing Advice from a Writing Teacher

Three Tips for Writing to Non-Specialists

The following post was excerpted from How to Write an Essay Like an Equation: A Brief Guide to Writing like You’re Doing Math. Check out Rebecca Helton’s full review.

You may have been told that your writing doesn’t flow well, but were you taught what that meant? More importantly, were you told how to fix it? Or perhaps you have been told that your writing flows well. Do you understand how or why?

Learning about content-lexical ties will help you understand and accomplish the “flow” that takes writing up a notch or two. The more your writing “flows,” the easier readers comprehend it. The more easily they comprehend it, the more easily they accept your ideas and the more highly they will rate your writing.

What is “Flow” Anyway?

When we talk about “flow,” we are talking about cohesion. Cohesion means unity or “sticking together.” When two things are cohesive, they stick together into one whole.

Cohesion in language, either spoken or written, refers to the unity or “sticking together” of ideas due to how they are expressed.

How do we express ideas so that they stick together or “flow”? We use content-lexical ties.

What are Content-Lexical Ties?

Let’s break down the term. Content, of course, refers to the ideas or information we present. Lexical is the adjective form of lexicon, which is a fancy word for vocabulary. A vocabulary is simply a storehouse of words. When you see “lexical,” think “words.” A tie binds things together.

Content-lexical ties are words (lexicon) that tie (bind) different pieces of content (ideas) together into a cohesive whole.

To put it another way, writing that “flows” uses certain types of words to connect new ideas to earlier ideas.

What Are Content-Lexical Ties?

There are four types of content-lexical ties (adapted from linguist Dilin Liu¹).

Type 1: Direct Repetition, Synonyms, and Antonyms

The first type of content-lexical tie consists of directly repeating key words and using synonyms, antonyms, or both to restate ideas without repeating the same words too much. Repeating key words at strategic places in your writing will simultaneously emphasize and connect ideas, facilitating comprehension and maintaining interest. Too much repetition, however, will become mind-numbing. Using synonyms allows you to restate key ideas without using the same exact words. Antonyms create contrasts with earlier ideas or wording, connecting that previous content with the current passage in your writing.

Notice how I used repetition, synonyms, and antonyms to connect ideas and create a smooth “flow” in the paragraph above? Let’s take a closer look. Below, the bold words are repetitions, and the bold-and-italic words are synonyms or antonyms.

The first type of content-lexical tie consists of directly repeating key words and using synonyms, antonyms, or both to restate ideas without repeating the same words. Repeating key words at strategic places in your writing will simultaneously emphasize and connect ideas, facilitating comprehension and maintaining interest. Too much repetition, however, will become mind-numbing. Using synonyms allows you to restate key ideas without using the same exact words. Antonyms create contrasts with earlier ideas or wording, connecting that previous content with the current passage in your writing.

The direct repetition, such as “repeating key words” in the first and second sentences, connects the information in those sentences to each other. Using synonyms, such as “restate ideas” and “repetition” for “repeating key words,” also connects ideas but without excessive repetition. The words “interest” and “mind-numbing” are antonyms. A contrasting relationship between one idea and another connects those ideas as well as the ideas around them.

Type 2: Related Words

So-called “related words” are the second type of content-lexical tie. Related words are contextual synonyms or antonyms. A “related word” wouldn’t normally mean the same thing or the opposite as another word, but it becomes a synonym or antonym in the context in which it is used.

Relying entirely on repetition and restatement can easily lead to stale writing. It’s very helpful to use related words to maintain variety while connecting ideas across a piece of writing. The words “flow” and “cohesion” don’t have the same dictionary definitions, but they mean the same thing in the context of writing. “Disorganized” and “flow” don’t mean the opposite of each other except when talking about writing. “Stale” and “variety” aren’t antonyms, but they become antonyms in the context of this paragraph. The previous sentence relates to the previous paragraph: “it [a related word] becomes a synonym or antonym in the context in which it is used.”

Related words are so effective because they are hardly noticed. They make the reading experience very smooth, but they don’t call attention to themselves as much as the other types of content-lexical ties. Thus they create subtle but strong cohesion throughout a piece of writing.

Type 3: Categories and Members of Categories

Categories and members of those categories comprise the third type of content-lexical tie.

This book, section, and paragraph are organized with categories and members thereof. The book is about writing, and each chapter explains a strategy or component of writing. In this section, I stated that there are four types of content-lexical ties, and then I named and explained each type. This paragraph begins with “book, section, and paragraph” and then discusses each one in turn. Implicitly, they are members of the category of writing. More explicitly, “section” and “paragraph” are members of “book.” Stating categories and their members can help structure writing on the levels of entire books and single paragraphs, achieving flow and cohesion.

Sometimes the subject matter lends itself to using categories and members, and sometimes it does not. Don’t force categories or members into your writing if they don’t fit. Having said that, if you expand your thinking about them, then you may identify more kinds of categories than you would expect. As shown above, depending on context, “writing” can be a category and “book, section, and paragraph” can be members of that category.

Type 4: Transition Sentences, Phrases, and Words

Each of the content-lexical ties above creates implicit, or indirectly suggested, connections among ideas. In contrast, transitions explicitly, or directly, tell readers how one idea relates to another. They usually occur at the beginning of paragraphs or sentences so that they help readers interpret the writing as they read it.

The transition word “therefore” tells readers that the next idea results from the previous one. The same is true for transition phrases like “as a result” or “in consequence.”

The transition word “however” tells readers that the next idea in some way contradicts the previous one. So do transition phrases such as “to the contrary” or “in contrast.”

Phrases like “for example” signal that the next idea elaborates on a prior one, while a phrase such as “since then” indicates a relationship of time.

You must use the transition word or phrase that signals the relationship that you want to convey. Here is a list of common transition words and phrases, organized according to their meanings:

Using appropriate transition words and phrases easily but effectively improves your writing’s flow. Add them to the beginning of paragraphs or sentences that start a new topic, point, or idea. Add them to sentences that need a stronger connection to earlier ideas in the writing. Directly stating relationships between ideas builds bridges that facilitate comprehension and create cohesion.

By stating the relationship between one paragraph and the next, transition sentences guide readers between the paragraphs. An effective transition sentence communicates two things: the main idea of the previous paragraph and the main idea, or point, of the paragraph into which you are transitioning. It is even more effective when you state the idea of the previous paragraph’s last sentence and then the point of the upcoming paragraph. This technique creates a strong bridge between the paragraphs.

In the paragraph above, for example, the first sentence refers back to the prior paragraph’s last sentence — “By stating the relationship between one paragraph and the next” refers to “Directly stating relationships between ideas.” The rest of the sentence states the upcoming topic, transition sentences.

Transition sentences often use phrases like, “In addition to …,” or ”In contrast to …,” or “Although …,” or “Similar to …,” to set up both the reference to a prior idea and the statement of the next idea. There are many more such phrases you might use, but I find these phrases to be quite flexible.

• “In addition to directly stating relationships among ideas, transitions add length to writing without being fluff.”
• “In contrast to directly stating relationships among ideas, other content-lexical ties imply the relationships.”
• “Although stating relationships between ideas is important, it cannot substitute for strong audience-awareness, purpose, and development of ideas.”
• “Similar to directly stating relationships among ideas, implying or suggesting connections also guides readers.

Notice that you can connect an idea or sentence to the next one in a variety of ways, depending on the nature of the idea into which you are transitioning. Use the phrasing that helps set up the kind of statement you want to make.

Whenever you need to improve the flow from one paragraph to the next, try the simple technique of writing a sentence that refers back to the previous paragraph or sentence and then states the main idea or point of the upcoming paragraph.

Combining Content-Lexical Ties

Ideally, you will use each type of content-lexical tie in the same piece of writing. Combining them will give you more flexibility in connecting your ideas for the reader. You don’t necessarily have to make sure you work in an antonym for the sake of doing so, especially if doing so would be awkward, but it should be fairly easy to find opportunities to incorporate some of each type.

Here is an example of a paragraph that combines all four types to create cohesion through both implicit and explicit connections among the ideas:

Renewable energy sources include solar, wind, and geothermal power. Solar power comes from solar panels, which are usually located in very sunny climates like deserts. The panels convert energy from the sun into electricity that can be transported or stored. Wind power comes from huge wind turbines located in open plains where strong winds blow almost incessantly. These turbines connect to generators, turning them to produce electricity. Lastly, geothermal power uses heat from underground sources to produce steam used by electric plants. While they hold promise, these sources can de-energize electric plants and de-power homes when clouds fill the sky, the wind stops, or the underground heat lessens.

Type 1: Words like “energy,” “solar,” and “power” are repeated throughout. “Energy” and “electricity” are synonyms. “Energy” and “de-energize” are antonyms.

Type 2: The word “power” is a contextual synonym, or related word, for “energy” and “electricity.” The word “de-power” is a contextual antonym.

Type 3: The passage begins with a category, “renewable energy sources,” and then describes members of that category, “solar, wind, and geothermal power.”

Type 4: The word “lastly” guides readers from the previous sentence into the upcoming sentence. The phrase, “while they hold promise,” similarly guides readers into the concluding sentence’s idea.

With just a little thoughtfulness, you can create numerous connections among your ideas, facilitate comprehension, and provide a smooth reading experience.

How to Use Content-Lexical Ties

There are two ways to apply content-lexical ties to your writing. Don’t worry. Pick the answer that is right for you. Try both if you’re not sure. They’re pretty similar anyway.

Option 1: you can consciously incorporate content-lexical ties as you write. You could write a point sentence and begin your supporting evidence. Then you could ask yourself, “How can I connect what I’m going to write back to those earlier ideas?”

That general question may suffice, but it should also help with asking and answering more specific questions:

• What key words or ideas should I repeat strategically?
• What synonyms or antonyms can I use to restate key ideas?
• In this context, what words or phrases would be related to each other and/or to what I have already written?
• Have I discussed any categories? Should I? If so, what members of those categories should I mention now?
• Would a transition sentence bridge between two ideas or sentences?
• Would a transition word or phrase guide the reader into an idea, topic, or sentence?

Option 2: you can incorporate content-lexical ties while rewriting and editing. Write the draft of your paragraph or entire paper. Read it and look for the content-lexical ties that you used (or didn’t). Then add more of them as needed.

Thought-Exercises

1. Now that you know what they are, consider how content-lexical ties help a conversation or piece of writing “flow” for you.
2. Think about how you might restate an idea several times without seeming to repeat yourself.
3. How many ways can you transition between a sentence about “kumquats” and a sentence about “machinery”?

Activities

1. Pick a paragraph or two out of an article at random. Identify the content-lexical ties.
2. Rewrite the same paragraph in your own words, coming up with your own content-lexical ties.
3. Write a paragraph in which you use all four types of content-lexical ties.

References

Liu, D. (2000). “Writing Cohesion: Using Content-Lexical Ties in ESOL.” English Teaching Forum.

Related Resources:

Practical Writing Advice from a Writing Teacher

Making Writing More Memorable and Persuasive 

One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Energize Your Words with Active Voice

One evening, my professor for Dissertation Seminar randomly grouped us in pairs to discuss our dissertations. A student specializing in Literature became partnered with me, a specialist in Composition and Rhetoric.

“What’s your dissertation about?” I asked.

“Narrative historiography,” my peer replied.

Before giving feedback on his ideas, I had to ask, “Um, what’s that?”

“It uses narratology to examine literature that reimagines historical events.”

“Oh. What’s narratology?”

As we progress through undergrad, grad school, and doctoral programs, we travel a winding staircase that progressively narrows until only the people in our siloed specialty remain with us. We become adept at writing about narrative historiography to people who already know about it, but we forget how to discuss our research to people outside our specialties.

Grant applications, journal articles, and other publications often have broader audiences than our fellow specialists. Here are three tips for writing effectively to broader audiences.

Recognize the Curse of Knowledge

When you understand something, you have difficulty remembering what it was like to not understand it. This difficulty makes it harder to communicate your understanding to others who haven’t obtained it yet. That’s the “curse of knowledge.”

Even after my classmate explained narratology, I still didn’t quite get narrative historiography until he used the example of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It’s a detective novel set in an alternate reality in which the Jewish nation-state resides in part of Alaska rather than in Israel. A hard-boiled detective investigates a murder and discovers a secretive group working to bring about the Messianic events required for a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Ooohhh! So “narrative historiography” is jargon for “how we tell stories about alternate reality and history.” Why didn’t you just say that? Because of the curse of knowledge.

To write clearly to non-specialists, you must be aware of the curse of knowledge. Remember there was a time when you didn’t understand your discipline like you do now. Remember that your audience may not understand it, think about how you came to grasp it, and adjust your communication to help them get it, too.

Hunt for Threshold Concepts and Jargon

The term “threshold concept” was coined by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept is a counter-intuitive idea that must be understood before you can fully understand other important concepts in a given discipline. A threshold concept transforms your views of discipline-specific content. Meyer and Land describe it as a “portal” to a new way of thinking. Often, we use jargon to name or describe threshold concepts.

For example, before you can understand “narrative historiography” as a concept in the field of Literature, you first need to understand that literature can be analyzed with a range of different paradigms, all grounded to varying degrees in the details of the text and the author. Once you realize literary analysis doesn’t make stuff up out of thin air, your view of literary analysis transforms.

To understand how CRISPR works, you need to understand DNA, RNA, and viruses. But when Jennifer Doudna explains CRISPR to lay-people, she doesn’t take it for granted that people share her deep understanding of genetics. She doesn’t use jargon like “gRNA,” “tracer RNA,” and “sgRNA.” Instead, she describes CRISPR as “cut-and-paste” and then walks her audience through some basic threshold concepts about DNA replication.

To mitigate the curse of knowledge in your writing, look for the threshold concepts and jargon whose understanding you take for granted. Then explain those concepts in more detail, using broadly familiar language, examples, and analogies.

Pretend You’re Writing to a New Grad Student

Of course, you can’t over-correct when writing to the non-specialists reading your grant application, journal article, or other publication. If you start explaining the scientific method to scientists, then you’ll offend your audience.

Imagine you’re writing to a new graduate student in your discipline. The student understands a lot about the discipline, but the student may not have achieved the threshold concepts, higher-level jargon, and paradigms that inform you as a PhD.

My classmate, for instance, didn’t need to explain the concept of using specific theories and paradigms in literary analysis (e.g., historical criticism, psychological criticism, etc.). I got that in undergrad. But he needed to explain higher-level concepts that hadn’t been part of either my Masters or my Doctorate in Composition and Rhetoric.

By pretending you’re writing to a new grad student, you can strike the balance between condescending to the audience and explaining what needs to be explained, between dumbing down your writing and providing the necessary details.

Example

Say you’re writing an NIH grant to fund research into neural trajectory representation. The reviewers will likely include fellow neurobiologists, neurologists, and neuroscientists. But will any of them specialize in continuous cortical signals, bioengineering, neural prostheses, or robotics? Will any of them understand directional tuning and population-based movement representation in the motor cortex?

To communicate about neural trajectory representation to these relative non-specialists, recognize the curse of knowledge, identify the threshold concepts and jargon that need to be explained, and pretend you’re explaining them to a brand-new doctorate student.

Using these tips, you might write something like the following:

Researching the neuronal connections in the motor cortex that fire when we move some part of our bodies could help bioengineers develop robotic prostheses that can be controlled with the mind. Neuronal firing in the motor cortex creates a neural ‘representation’ of the direction and speed of volitional movements. People can imagine volitional movements, creating the neuronal firing that leads to neural representation of trajectory. If connected neurally to robotic prostheses, imagining movements enables people to control the prostheses with their minds.

Instead of throwing around “neural trajectory representation” and “continuous cortical signals” like everyone knows those concepts, remember that you didn’t always know them yourself and that people outside your narrow specialty likely don’t know them either. Recognize the curse of knowledge.

To explain “neural trajectory representation,” you need to identify it as a threshold concept and explain it with the detail necessary for passing through the portal to a new understanding. Describing neuronal firing in the motor cortex allows you to explain that this firing creates a “representation” of both direction and speed, i.e., trajectory. Then references to “trajectory” in the context of neurobiology will make sense to neurobiologists with different specialties.

But the example doesn’t condescend by defining neurons, neuronal connections, neuronal firing, or the motor cortex. The neuroscientists and bioengineers reviewing the grant may not share your narrow specialty, but they still know a thing or two. Pretending they’re new grad students helps you explain what they need explained without over-explaining, offending, and wasting their time.

Conclusion

Influential literacy theorist Walter Ong says it’s essential to know what the audience knows and doesn’t know. That’s how writers know what to explain and what to assume.

Don’t let the curse of knowledge mislead you about what the audience knows and doesn’t know. Look for the threshold concepts and jargon that should be explained so your readers grasp what you’re trying to convey. Pretend you’re writing to a new grad student so you don’t over-explain.

It will avoid awkward confusion and questions about narratology, sgRNA, and neural trajectories.

Eric Sentell teaches writing and rhetoric at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the author of How to Write an Essay like an Equation and Become Your Own Fact-Checker. Learn more about his work at www.EricSentell.com.

Related Resources:

Practical Writing Advice from a Writing Teacher

An Entertaining & Robust Writing Roundup

Edge Writing Resources Roundup

The beginner’s eye, not to be confused with Bette Davis eyes, is looking at things as if you’ve never seen them before.  What if you reviewed your last several months’ worth of experiments as if you’ve never seen them before – no hypothesis, no preconceived notions, just a clean slate and a basic understanding of your science (hey that sounds like a reviewer!).

Beginner’s eye is critical in science. Consider your favorite hypothesis. I intentionally use the word favorite, because we get an idea about what is going on and start to build on it. As we build, we limit our analysis to the context of our working assumptions. Or maybe that’s just me.

For example, I recently had an interesting observation about a protein I’m working with. I got enough data to form a hypothesis, and then recently found something that contradicts the hypothesis. Do I explain it away, or take a closer look? The contradiction kept popping up, and I now feel compelled to take a closer look. I plan to revisit my recent work, as best possible, with a fresh eye and see what comes up.

Of course, there are ways to help keep our mental tendencies for bias on the straight and narrow. The whole “rigor and responsibility” thing for NIH grants is geared towards this, even though it was  developed as much or more for public accountability as for scientists. Nevertheless, as scientists we can and should take these elements to heart to improve our work. Consistent use of positive and negative controls (ok I’m really going back to the basics here), blinded analysis, sufficient replicates, etc all help subdue the “demon bias”. Getting a fresh look from a colleague unfamiliar with your work can help too. Besides making for better science, you’ll probably uncover some potential objections from reviewers that you might not have otherwise noticed.

Although keeping bias out of work is always a good thing, the main benefit to the beginner eye is seeing something you haven’t before. As Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast says, or more accurately sings, “There may be something there that wasn’t there before.” For those of you who aren’t Disney fans, try this quote from Shuryu Suzuki,

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

This quote is worth sitting with for a moment. Think about all of the mental constraints that you’ve built up based on past experiences. No, I’m not just talking about science anymore. There are entire books about the implications of this idea, so I’ll leave it for you to think about. Let me instead suggest a treatment. Note I said treatment because there is no cure. We all interpret life through the bias of our experiences, but awareness of this bias helps. I mentioned taking a fresh look at old data, but you can practice taking a fresh look at life. Consider the water coming from your shower head as something you’ve never seen before, or the cold closed box of your refrigerator. Wonder at the usefulness of a door knob. Try this for even five or ten minutes, and you’ll be amazed at the world around you.

Related Resources:

Three Tips for Writing to Non-Specialists

Fresh Ideas for Writing Innovation in Your NIH Grants

Not that Kind of Year: Tales of Year 1 as a New PI

My PhD mentor was a great guy, but like most of us he wasn’t perfect. What was his flaw? He liked to use big words. Depending on the audience, airing out the “big words” might be appropriate, but for the most part big words make for cumbersome and confusing writing. William Zinsser, author of On Writing Well, advises that we not use a long word when a shorter one will do. He had a lot to say about adverbs and passive verbs as well, but that’s a topic for another day.

What difference does it make? Big words, little words, “just right” words, who cares?  You do – if you are writing to be understood. Words are the foundation of your manuscript, grant, blog post, or even email. A shaky foundation makes for shaky writing. John Wooden, one of the most successful basketball coaches of all time, taught about foundations. He recruited the best basketball players in the country to his program at UCLA, yet the beginning of the first practice of the year was always the same. He taught the players how to put on their socks and shoes. Why? Because socks with wrinkles cause blisters, blisters cause sore feet, and sore feet put good players on the bench.

The words you choose, or as importantly don’t choose, are the key to clarity. When you choose your words with intent, you write a powerful piece. Words are a tool you must use, but if you write with intention you will get much more out of them. It’s like the remote for your TV. You have to use it to turn the TV on (well, I do, because I’m lazy), but if you only use it for the power button you’re missing out on all the other features like record, search, etc.

Now that I’ve stated my case for the importance of words, I’ll step down from my soap box and get back to the topic at hand. Big words. Why do we use big words when smaller words have the same meaning? Scientists are supposed to be smart, so we want to sound smart. When we use longer words when a shorter one will do, however, who are we writing for? Are we writing for ourselves or the reader? Stringing together unnecessarily long, complex words can slow down, confuse, and/or frustrate the reader, perhaps to the point of giving up (think legal brief). Let’s look at a couple examples:

The inebriated stripling inadvertently micturated in the corner.

You might breeze right through this, or a couple of the above words might make you pause for a second. The short word translation, of course, is:

The drunk teen accidentally peed in the corner.

If you haven’t heard the word micturate before, you probably got it from the context of the sentence. You don’t want your reader to guess, though, because he/she is unlikely to take the time to look it up and their contextual definition might not be correct.

Let’s look at another sentence.

As the dour dowager stepped outside, the petrichor in the air elicited a glower.

In this case understanding the unknown words from context is a bit trickier. You probably know dour and dowager, especially if you’re a fan of BBC shows like Downton Abbey. What is petrichor? If you already know, you have an extraordinary vocabulary so you have to be particularly careful about “big words”. For everyone else, what do you think it means? Is it a smell, like pollution or manure? Is visible, like haze or dust? The context implies that it is something negative. The short word translation is:

As the crabby old woman stepped outside, the smell of fresh rain made her frown.

Why would anyone frown at the smell of fresh rain? Who knows, maybe she didn’t want to get her feet wet or her grass needed mowing. We’ll never know. The point is that you/your reader can’t always figure out the meaning of words through their context. Of course, as with everything in life there is a balance. I’m not suggesting you write in crayon with only 3 letter words. The key benchmark, as mentioned above, is whether the larger word is necessary.

My intent is not for you to think about every word, as if you’re cleaning out your closet with Marie Kondo. I’m just suggesting a little awareness. However, I pledge that if you don’t divagate from your bourne of scribing with intent, the resolution of your writing will be meliorated.

Related Resources:

Exciting AND Consistent? Verbs and Nouns in Scientific Writing

Who Are You Really Talking To?

The Readability of Scientific Texts is Decreasing Over Time

In the last week, you’ve reviewed a couple hundred grant proposals. Or skimmed a couple hundred CVs and cover letters. Or graded a hundred papers. Which proposal will you advocate for? Which candidate will you pound the table to interview? Which student will you write an enthusiastic recommendation for when asked two years later?

Probably the most memorable one.

To act on information, it needs to be in long-term memory so that it’s accessible when needed and can exert a lasting, formative impact.

Sure, you can always reread or look something up, but compelling communication sticks with you. It resides among the long-term memories that make you you, influencing your perspective, attitudes, and beliefs.

Schema theory can help you achieve compelling, influential memorability in your grant proposals, scholarly articles, and other writing.

A Ghost Story Reveals How Memory Uses Schema

Schema theory dates to Sir Frederick Bartlett’s seminal work, Remembering.

In one of several studies he recounts, Bartlett had white, middle-class British subjects read and then recall a Native American ghost story. Invariably, they added, deleted, exaggerated, or downplayed various details. Yet they insisted they recalled the story as it was written.

Significantly, the British participants changed the culturally unfamiliar details and replaced them with more familiar versions. Some people went so far as to take the ghost out of the ghost story! When questioned about their recollections, the subjects insisted they were recalling the story as it was originally told. Bartlett realized that their memories weren’t faulty; rather, human memory is reconstructive: we reconstruct events and information in the process of recalling them.

So-called “memory gaffes,” such as Brian Williams embellishing a story of his war journalism the more he retold it, become much more explicable and innocent when we realize that people often (re)combine experiences and information from various sources into a new memory so unified that we can’t disentangle which information came from which source.

Our reconstructions often involve schemata, or organized conceptual frameworks, that help structure and facilitate our cognition. Bartlett’s British subjects lacked schemata for details specific to Native American culture, so their reconstructions of the ghost story transformed those details so that they fit into their existing schemata. Brian Williams’ schemata probably included the danger of getting shot down by a missile and stories of other helicopters meeting that fate.

In a widely-cited study, Elizabeth Loftus demonstrated that people overestimate the speed of cars in a traffic accident if an interviewer asks, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” as opposed to verbs like “hit” or “collided.” Some people even recalled broken glass on the pavement even though there was none!

The word “smashed” affected the subjects’ reconstruction of the accident. “Smashed” activated a different schema for car accidents than, say, “bumped.” Many similar misinformation studies have confirmed memory’s reconstructive, malleable nature.

If memory is reconstructive, then communication can either facilitate or impede effective, accurate reconstruction.

High School Flyers and Self-Schema Filters

We have schemata for all manner of things, including ourselves. A “self-schema” can be described as an organized conceptual framework about oneself. For an NIH study section member, it might include a combination of physician, infectious disease specialist, experienced collaborator with radiologists and engineers, and eagerness to support projects that propose unique uses of radiologic techniques and equipment in the setting of infectious disease.

Our senses are bombarded by countless stimuli per second, and self-schemata filter those stimuli so that we pay attention only to what’s important. Self-schemata affect whether we notice something, how much attention we pay to it, and whether we try to encode it into long-term memory.

I asked twenty people, ten teachers and ten students, to walk down a high school hallway and report the flyers and posters they recalled. Theoretically, everyone should have remembered the flyers and posters with certain memorable characteristics, such as colorful imagery. This happened, but more commonly, the subjects’ self-schemata determined what they remembered.

Both the teachers and students remembered things that were relevant to their self-schemata. The teachers primarily remembered flyers about upcoming school club meetings or ACT exam dates in case their students asked. The students mainly remembered posters and flyers that connected with their identities.

As the lone subject who noticed a flyer about a gun raffle said, “I noticed and remembered it because I’m a hunter, and I’d like to win a new deer rifle.”

How Schema Make Information Memorable

Schema create memorability in (at least) two ways:

• Engaging Existing Schema for the Topic
• Engaging Relevant Self-Schema

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath capture how schemata can make information easier to understand and more memorable. You could explain a pomelo in technical detail, the Heaths say, by describing its size, shape, color, texture, etc. Or you could say that it’s like a grapefruit.

We form schema to facilitate cognition and memory, so we naturally update and refine them when we learn new information. The audience can easily update their schema for grapefruit to include pomelos as similar fruit, rather than the more difficult task of creating a brand new schema for pomelos.

Your audience will almost always have existing schemata for the topic at hand. If you can activate those schemata and help the audience incorporate new information into them, then your communication will be much more memorable and effective.

To be most memorable and compelling, you can also activate the audience’s self-schema. Your information will pass through the audience’s attentional filter and connect with them personally and emotionally.

Example of Making Information Memorable

Unless they’ve recently emerged from filming a reality TV show, current readers will be well-acquainted with COVID-19, social distancing, contact tracing, testing, and vaccine development. They may or may not be familiar with using specific UV wavelengths to kill bacteria and viruses without harming human tissue, sanitizing occupied rooms.

To make a proposal for NIH funding to test the efficacy of narrow-wavelength UV light more memorable and compelling, you might write something like the following:

A vaccine’s ultimate purpose is to safeguard society through herd immunity. Yet herd immunity against COVID-19 will be elusive due to unequal vaccine distribution, the anti-vaxxing movement, and SARS-CoV-2 mutations. We propose to test whether novel short-wavelength UV light can effectively kill viruses and sanitize public spaces, offices, homes, clothing, groceries, and household items without affecting human eyes, skin, or other tissues. If successful, this novel technology can help secure public health and economic reopening regardless of vaccine production, distribution, or compliance.

The opening sentence activates the NIH reviewer’s self-schema as a medical expert. It screams professional relevance while also appealing to the personal desire to help people. It aims to make the reviewer nod in agreement. Pushing through the attentional filter of self-schema, the sentence ensures full attention and connects emotionally.

The next sentences tap into existing schemata implying reams of information about attaining herd immunity and resuming normal-ish life. They also help the reviewer incorporate the proposed technology into existing schemata for killing viruses and disinfecting public spaces, etc., imagining how it could work and how impactful it could be.

For more advice on aligning your grant application with organizational values, read my post on audience-based rhetoric. Go ahead and open a new tab. The conclusion isn’t going anywhere.

Conclusion

Giving some thought to your audience’s self-schema can help your writing stand out and ”stick” with readers. Try to appeal to the readers’ images of themselves and to ground new ideas in existing, familiar concepts.

Tapping into existing schemata for your topic can help you communicate more clearly, efficiently, and memorably. And memorable communication can influence future judgments, decisions, and actions.

Eric Sentell teaches writing and rhetoric. He is the author of How to Write an Essay like an Equation and Become Your Own Fact-Checker. Learn more about his work at EricSentel.medium.com.

Read More

How a Jailhouse Letter and Goat Research Can Get Your Grant Funded

Three Tips for Writing to Non-Specialists

Using Content-Lexical Ties to Connect Ideas in Writing

In today’s class, we’re going to talk about the scientist’s adverb. I bet you didn’t know that scientists have an adverb all their own, so you’re no doubt thrilled that you stumbled upon this post.

Before I get too far, I sense some of you are struggling to remember the specifics of adverbs. In fact, some of you might be getting sweaty palms just thinking about grammar worksheets and identifying parts of sentences. Take a deep breath. You’re not in middle school –  this is just for fun. To refresh your memory, adverbs modify verbs. If a word ends in “ly” then it’s a probably an adverb. Before the big reveal, I should mention that writers (i.e., real writers like Stephen King) hate adverbs. King has a famous quote that starts, “I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.” Need I say more?

I can sense you’re getting impatient, so here it is. The scientist’s adverb is “strikingly.”  I’ll be calmly reading an article and then, yep, there is again, strikingly. Most often, strikingly comes at the beginning of the sentence.  Strikingly, when incubated for 24h with Equine Growth Factor, the bacteria E. secretariatum tripled in size and grew into the shape of a horse. I assume the writer uses the word “strikingly” to wake up the reader. Perhaps it’s meant to be a neon sign, flashing and pointing to the rest of the sentence, saying, “Hey, this is the important part, pay attention!” Okay, I get that. I’ve been known to slip an adverb into the beginning of a sentence as a bit of a “pick me up” for the reader. However, I’m more of a “surprisingly” gal. Maybe this relates to some deep borne insecurity as a child. Sounds like a good topic for my next therapy session.

Although childhood trauma could be part of my aversion, another part is just the feeling the word gives me. “Strikingly” makes me think of Clark Kent ripping open his plain white shirt to reveal a bulging chest with the letter S emblazoned in the middle of his super suit. “Ta da, here I am, ready to vanquish my foes!” By contrast, the word “surprise” conjures images of unexpected delight – flowers, a small gift, an empty dishwasher…..

I started this post by saying that strikingly is the scientist’s adverb, implying that strikingly is used less frequently in non-science writing. Being a scientist at heart, I thought I’d “put my money where my mouth is” and see if there’s any truth to this rumor. First, I searched PubMed for the word strikingly, and compared this to my preferred adverb, surprisingly. Let’s face it, surprisingly is a more common word, and it got 90,155 hits as opposed to the challenger, coming in at 33,645, or about a 3-fold difference. I chose the New York Times as a non-science comparator. One unexpected problem (like in a grant) was that when I searched the NYT archives for the “ly” version of either word I also got all “ing” versions plus the “ly.”  For both words, the “ing” version was used much more often than the “ly.” I guess writers published in the NYT agree with Stephen King. Anyway, to address this unexpected pitfall, I only looked at article titles. I then counted 239 titles that contained “surprising” and 239 that contained “striking” or the adverb form of each. Why 239? That’s when I got tired. Of 239 titles with the word surprising or surprisingly, 29/239 or 12% had the adverb form. Strikingly, on the other hand, was only used twice in 239 titles (0.008%). Therefore, in the scientific literature, surprisingly was used only 3x more often than strikingly, but in the non-scientific literature, surprisingly beat strikingly by over 14-fold. Ah ha!! Scientists do have a tendency to use strikingly. Case closed. Quod erat demonstrandum. All done, bye bye.

Okay, quell your righteous indignation. I realize my experimental design lacked rigor, but that’s okay, I’m not trying to cure cancer, just doing a little sleuthing for fun. Another fun fact? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of strikingly peaked in the 1850’s, but it’s still on the rise in PubMed.

Last, but not least, according to PubMed the word strikingly was first used in the title of a paper by S Theobold in 1894, “The Ophthalmoscope Does Not Always Reveal Latent Hypermetropia, With Notes Of A Case Strikingly Illustrative Of This Fact” published in Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society.

One might surmise that my social isolation has gotten the better of me and has reduced me to searching adverbs in PubMed. Alternatively (note adverb slip), one might hypothesize that I like words. No doubt there’s an element of truth to both.

Related Resources:

One-Minute Writing Tuneup: Don’t Dangle Your Modifiers Off a Cliff

Exciting AND Consistent? Verbs and Nouns in Scientific Writing

The Write Rules

In FY2018, NIH received nearly 55,000 grant applications and funded just over 11,000, a 20% success rate. The NSF gets about 40,000 applications a year and also funds about 11,000. Many great research proposals are left unfunded each year.

To give your grant application its best chance, ground the proposal’s persuasive appeals in the values of the granting organization and its reviewers. So-called “audience-based rhetoric” persuades much more effectively than just stating the reasons your grant is the best idea ever.

MLK’s Jail-House Letter: Audience-Based Rhetoric

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is a classic example of using an audience’s values to persuade them. The letter responded to a group of white clergymen who said that participants in the 1963 Birmingham bus boycotts should follow laws (specifically, an ordinance against marching without a permit) rather than practice civil disobedience.

Among his other arguments, King pointed out that the Boston Tea Party was an act of civil disobedience, that the founders of the United States had refused to follow unjust laws, and that Nazi Germany required reporting Jews and penalized sheltering them. Imagine those American clergymen reading their values thrown back at them but still insisting on adhering to Jim Crow!

Of course, you must get to know your audience’s values before you can appeal to them.

Getting to Know your Grant Proposal’s Audience

When you read the RFA and other advice for applicants, don’t only pay attention to requirements, deadlines, and details. Also look for the values espoused by the organization.

Consider some of the questions that NIH poses about a project’s significance when explaining what reviewers look for:

Does the project address an important problem or a critical barrier to progress in the field? … How will successful completion of the [project’s] aims … drive this field? (emphasis added)

Your research addresses a very important problem — in your eyes. But from the NIH reviewer’s perspective, is your important problem a “critical barrier to progress in the field?” Will your project, if successful, “drive” the field forward? In other words, does your project support NIH’s values?

Appealing to Your Grant Proposal’s Audience

Audience-based rhetoric doesn’t mean that you insert phrases like, “My project addresses a critical barrier to progress” or “Successful completion will drive my field,” and declare your persuasive work done. It means crafting your research methods and proposal with the audience’s values in mind.

Say you want to develop a machine that can run dozens of tests on a single drop of blood, without getting all Elizabeth Holmes about it. If you argue that your project merits funding because the new test will make phlebotomy less painful, then you’re stating why you think the project is great. But you’re not relating your project and its outcomes to NIH’s values.

Instead, you might argue that the ability to run numerous tests on a minimal amount of blood will open new vistas of medical research, dramatically increase the efficiency and quality of medical care, usher in an era of routine blood testing, facilitate early diagnoses, catch more preventable illnesses, and make phlebotomy less painful. (No wonder Theranos was a thing.)

For any grant application, you must demonstrate that your project both aligns with and achieves the granting organization’s values. Maybe your project has more modest goals than influencing an entire field, but you should still present it as “driving” your field forward if you want NIH’s money.

Goat Research as Audience-Based Rhetoric

Goat research may seem like an odd example of presenting a (modest) proposal as if it “drives” a field, but hopefully, it will lodge as firmly in your memory as the following story stuck in mine.

Eleven years ago, I attended a graduate research symposium where a grad student listed catheterizing goats as one of her research project’s most significant results. I was baffled until she contrasted her method of obtaining urine samples with the standard, inhumane method of suffocating goats until they urinated!

Still, I wondered why goats were worth researching, why anyone should care about their urine samples. If that grad student were applying for an NIH grant to analyze goat urine, I’m sure the reviewers would have similar questions.

In answer, the applicant could write something like the following:

Testing goat urine for biomarkers associated with antibiotics has the potential for three significant impacts on the fields of animal science, agriculture, and nutrition science. First, detecting excessive amounts of these biomarkers would indicate possible health impacts on livestock and from consuming livestock. Completing the research would also demonstrate how a new, more humane method of urine collection can be used on other livestock and similar animals.

Future researchers in animal science, agriculture, and other fields would be able to conduct more ethical research on animals, in accordance with the PHS Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and NIH’s guidance to “avoid or minimize animal discomfort, distress, and pain.” This proposed research would create new norms for animal research sponsored by NIH, which would then spread to other institutions and advance the ethics of all animal research.

This example aligns with several of NIH’s values by presenting the research as propelling multiple fields (animal science, agriculture, and nutrition science) with both new knowledge (antibiotic levels) and innovative methods (catheterizing goats). It also frames the new, more humane method of collecting goat urine as supporting NIH’s explicitly stated value on minimizing animal discomfort and its implicit value of shaping fields and methods of research.

The example argues that the research could turn up nothing about antibiotic levels yet still serve NIH’s values, goals, and purposes by transforming the methods and ethics of animal research, thus positioning NIH as a powerful influence on future research regardless of the project’s findings.

Even something as esoteric as catheterizing goats can come across as a potential game-changer when it aligns with the audience’s values.

Conclusion

Identifying and using the audience’s values will help you develop arguments that not only persuade but also excite reviewers to recommend your research project. Carefully review the RFP for the granting organization’s explicit and implicit values and build them into how you describe your research. Especially the goat research.

Eric Sentell teaches writing and rhetoric at Southeast Missouri State University. He is the author of How to Write an Essay like an Equation and Become Your Own Fact-Checker. Learn more about his work, sign up for a newsletter, and get free excerpts at www.EricSentell.com.

Related Resources:

Getting Your Ducks in a Row for that First Big Grant Submission

Finding Motivation When You’re Ready to Quit

Shark Tank for Scientists: NIH’s SBIR/STTR Grants

Sentence after sentence in passive voice is wordy, invites errors such as dangling modifiers, and grates on readers’ nerves. Use of active voice improves even science writing.

In active voice, a clearly stated subject performs the action of the sentence. In passive voice, the subject receives the action of the sentence (generally with a form of “to be” as a helper verb).

Active voice: We collected samples.

Passive voice: Samples were collected.

Passive voice hides the person or entity performing the action. You could add “by [whom]” to the end of the sentence, but it’s clunky and adds words: Samples were collected by the technician.

Passive voice also makes the sin of dangling modifiers easy to commit, as in this example:

Using makeitupium to induce the Soundscool Process, the DNA was found to have unusual properties.

Who was using makeitupium? The introductory clause implies a researcher is the subject of this sentence. But as the sentence continues we learn “DNA” is in fact the subject. The modifier (“using makeitupium”) modifies a subject not present in the sentence. Rewriting the sentence in active voice corrects this:

Using makeitupium to induce the Soundscool Process, we found the DNA had unusual properties.

The opening modifier now applies to the intended subject, “we.” As a bonus, you no longer need to use the infinitive “to have,” shortening the sentence.

Passive voice and its suppression of the sentence’s subject is not always evil. In a methods section, your sentences probably all have the same subject, i.e., you or your team; moreover, you likely wish to highlight the action performed rather than the subject, you, the researcher. However, your reader gets fatigued when reading several sentences with the same structure. Help him or her by interspersing sentences in active voice:

We enrolled 200 subjects and collected demographic information. Blood samples were taken from each subject and analyzed for Compound X. All analyses were done with Machine Y. We then used Statistical Test A to examine the relationship between race, gender, and the presence of Compound X in the blood.

Keep your writing clear and effective with regular tuneups. Small adjustments make a big difference.

Related Resources:

Using Content-Lexical Ties to Connect Ideas in Writing

The Write Rules

Three Tips for Writing to Non-Specialists

Read More

UNC Writing Center Passive Voice Handout

Towson Online Writing Support: Active/Passive Voice

Biomedical Editor: The Value of Passive Voice

Duke Gradate School Scientific Writing Resource: Passive Voice in Scientific Writing

American Chemical Society: Active vs. Passive Voice in Scientific Writing