in several ways. Some thesis authors pick up the passive verb
forms and anonymized subjects favoured by government
bureaucracies or lawyers: ‘It was felt that ...’, ‘It was decided
that ...’. Others create implied subjects by verbal means, such
as using ‘this’ without an accompanying noun as the subject:
‘This entailed ...’. All such usages need to be carefully excised.
There must be no ambiguity either about which is the main
verb. It should be highlighted in the sentence structure, and it
should be clearly superior in importance to any other second-
ary verb forms included in the sentence. Not all sentences have
objects, but most do and it is worth following through the same
discipline for them also. Do not interpose any other element
between subject, verb andobject. Nothing should impair their
double-bonding or break up the sentence core. This rule means
that qualifying or subordinate clauses are always best placed at
the beginning or ends of sentences, never in the middle, which
should be reserved for the core. And other terms or phrases
in sentences, such as adjectives and qualifier or descriptor words,
should generally be placed before or after the subject/verb/
object also.
In order to keep the subject/verb/object core clearly visible,
sentences should not get too long and they should have the
simplest feasible grammatical construction. Many PhD students
seem to feel that writing professional-looking text requires
them to construct great, rambling sentences. The tone of their
writing differs markedly from their conversational approach.
It becomes replete with subordinate or qualifying clauses, so
that their sentences require complex grammatical construc-
tions to hold them together. All the main word-processing
packages have facilities which will identify for you the average
number of words per sentence in any piece of text, and usually
the maximum sentence length also. (Look under ‘Tools’ for the
‘Word Count’ facility in Microsoft’s Word, and under
‘Document Information’ in Wordperfect.) My suggested rule of
thumb here is that you should never write a sentence longer
than 40 words, and that you should aim for an ideal sentence
length of around 20 words. Wherever a sentence is more than
40 words long, you should always chunk it up into two or three
sentences. Where it is between 20 and 40 words, you should
assess if it would be better split into two. Problems with long
WRITING CLEARLY◆ 115