Gopen and Swan Quiz

Which best describes Gopen and Swan’s approach to scientific writing?

• The purpose of scientific discourse is the actual communication of information and thought.

• The purpose of scientific writing is to prove your hypothesis.

• The purpose of scientific writing is so complex that the writing has to be incomprehensible.

• The purpose of scientific writing is to make simple things sound more sophisticated.

Which components of the structure of a scientific text act as clues alerting the reader to its scientific substance?

• Data arranged in a table

• The font size changes from section to section

• There is no Bibliography or Works Cited section because the experiment was the authors’ own idea

• In place of standard, well-labeled graphs, images of celebrities are used as metaphors for trends in the data

Subject-Verb Separation: Which of the following sentences below best exemplifies Gopen and Swan’s advice for Subject-Verb proximity?

• Lawrence and Cattila, who were unable to replicate their results, published the first experimental study supporting the flat earth hypothesis.

• Lawrence and Cattila published the first experimental study supporting the flat earth hypothesis, though they were unable to replicate their initial results.

Finish the sentence: “The stress position coincides with…”

• …the approaching deadline.

• …the hook at the beginning of the introduction.

• …the posture of hunching over a specimen and probing it with tweezers.

• …the moment of syntactic closure.

When Gopen and Swan write that the topic position principle is analogous to the proverbial wisdom, “First things first,” the “first things” are:

• Perspective and context

• Closure and fulfillment

• Figures and stats

• First names before last names

When a writer neglects to include old information in conjunction with new information in a sentence, it’s often because…

• …the connections are so clear in the writer’s mind that they seem unnecessary to state.

• …the writer is actually a mystery writer.

• …the reader actually misread. Writers never make this mistake.

• …they are smarter than their readers.

In which of the following is the action of the sentence articulated by the verb?

• In multiple trials it was measured that plant growth is weaker when there is restricted sunlight.

• Restricted sunlight weakened plant growth measurably across multiple trials.

In the context of scientific writing, Gopen and Swan define “[a] writer’s personal style” to be

• The sum of all the structural choices that person tends to make when facing the challenges of creating discourse.

• Measured by their adherence to proven rules, such as avoiding split infinitives or using the active voice instead of the passive.

• The average word length of their sentences.

• The index of decimal figures recorded in their data.

Gopen and Swan assert that, “[t]here can be no fixed algorithm for good writing, for two reasons.” Which of the following is NOT one of those reasons:

• Too many reader expectations at any given moment for structural decisions to remain clear and easily activated.

• Any reader expectation can be violated to good effect.

• Good writing is too subjective for scientists, and thus scientific discourse does not abide by recognizable structural conventions.

Colomb, Gregory G., and Joseph M. Williams. 1985. “Perceiving structure in professional prose: a multiply determined experience.” In Writing in Non-Academic Settings, eds. Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami. Guilford Press, pp. 87-128.

The above reference from Gopen and Swan’s bibliography conforms to which style guide…

• MLA

• IEEE

• APA

• Chicago