Your Professors' Advice

From Professor David Kravitz, Professor of Management:

My primary advice is that students keep their audience in mind. That has many implications. It also assumes students have already mastered the basics of grammar. Beyond that, I can do no better than summarize the points in an article I recommend to all my students, as given below. Gopen, G. D., & Swan, J. A. (1990). The science of scientific writing. American Scientist, 78, 550-558. Principles for clear writing, based on satisfaction of reader expectations, are given below. These principles should not be slavishly adhered to; violations can sometimes be made to good effect.   1. Every unit of discourse, no matter the size, should serve a single function or make a single point. 2. Place the person or thing whose "story" a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position. 3. Place appropriate "old information" (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward. 4. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb. 5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb. 6. Place in the stress position the "new information" you want the reader to emphasize. The stress position coincides with the moment of syntactic closure. A reader has reached the beginning of the stress position when she knows there is nothing left in the clause or sentence but the material presently being read. Within a sentence, secondary stress positions can be formed by the appearance of a properly used colon or semicolon; by grammatical convention, the material preceding these punctuation marks must be able to stand by itself as a complete sentence. Thus stress positions exist directly in front of periods, colons, and semicolons. 7. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new. 8. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.