I said in the last post that I wanted to impart some tips on writing which have been very useful to me. These are all taken from a great article, The Science of Scientific Writing, by George Gopen and Judy Swan.
Gopen & Swan’s big theme is ‘reader expectations.’ Readers, it turns out, don’t just suck up all the words in a text indiscriminately, scramble them all in a mental blender, and absorb the resulting purée as pure information. Instead they look for a running story in any stretch of prose. And, semi-consciously, they – we – look for clues to that story in the structural choices made by the writer. I’ll explain what this really means below. Continue reading “Writing: it’s all about the reader”