James Hartley

Eighty ways of improving instructional text

This paper presents suggestions for improving instructional text under three main headings: prose materials, graphic materials, and typographic considerations. Each suggestion is based on research findings and references are made to this research whenever possible. Readers are reminded, however, that these suggestions are generalizations — often drawn from specific and limited cases — and caution is therefore necessary in their application.

Reading and writing book reviews across the disciplines

Reading and writing book reviews for learned journals plays an important part in academic life but little is known about how academics carry out these tasks. The aim of this research was to explore these activities with academics from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. An electronic questionnaire was used to ascertain (a) how often the respondents read and wrote book reviews, (b) how useful they found them, and (c) what features they thought important in book reviews. Fifty-two academics in the arts, 53 in the social sciences, and 51 in the sciences replied. There were few disciplinary differences. Most respondents reported reading between one and five book reviews a month and writing between one and two a year. There was high overall agreement between what the respondents thought were important features of book reviews, but there were also wide individual differences between them. This agreement across the disciplines supports the notion that book reviews can be seen as an academic genre with measurable features. This has implications for how they are written, and how authors might be taught to write them better. A potential checklist for authors is suggested.

To attract or to inform : What are titles for?

This article critiques some titles in journal articles for being misleading and it argues that titles need to be informative. Examples are given of work on measuring the effectiveness of titles in two areas—sentence structure and reader comprehension—and the article concludes with brief comments on the effectiveness of book titles.

From Structured Abstracts to Structured Articles: A Modest Proposal

Work with structured abstracts—which contain sub-headings in a standard order—has suggested that such abstracts contain more information, are of a higher quality, and are easier to search and to read than are traditional abstracts. The aim of this article is to suggest that this work with structured abstracts can be extended to cover scientific articles as a whole. The article outlines a set of sub-headings—drawn from research on academic writing—that can be used to make the presentation of scientific papers easier to read and to write. Twenty published research papers are then analyzed in terms of these sub-headings. The analysis, with some reservations, supports the viability of this approach.

Legal ease and ‘Legalese’

Abstract This paper reviews the evidence for Redishs (1979) seven propositions concerning legal text. These propositions are: (i) many legal documents cannot be read and understood by lay persons; (ii) people without legal training have to read and understand legal documents; (iii) much legal writing is unintelligible, even to lawyers; (iv) tradition – not necessity – and a lack of understanding of the audience – are the major reasons that legal language is so obscure; (v) legal language can be made clear without losing its precision; (vi) it is not the technical vocabulary but the complex sentence structure that makes legal writing difficult to understand; and (vii) clarity is not the same as simplicity, brevity or ‘Plain English’. The evidence supports all of these propositions, except perhaps the fifth and sixth. The research shows that writing legal text requires more attention to be given to readers than is typically the case.

Refereeing and the single author

The reported refereeing times taken from submission to acceptance for psychology journal articles were assessed in three separate studies, and the results then pooled. The pooled data suggested (i) that the papers of single authors were refereed faster than were those of pairs or larger groups, and (ii) that the papers of single authors that contained portions that had previously been delivered at conferences were refereed fastest of all. Some limitations of these studies that might have a bearing on these conclusions are considered.

On Choosing Typographic Settings for Reference Lists

References at the end of journal articles are typically printed in one of three or four major referencing styles, together with hundreds of different ways of presenting the elements within the references themselves. This paper suggests that greater clarity could be achieved by choosing between one of two major referencing styles, and using an agreed setting for the elements within both of them.

What do we know about footnotes? Opinions and data

Background: There is a scattered literature on various aspects of the design, use and information conveyed by foot-notes in academic text that can be considered under the three headings of sociological, psychological and typographical matters. Aims: The aims of this paper are: (i) to review this literature and (ii) to report the results from a small-scale enquiry into academics’ attitudes to footnotes and endnotes and their positioning in text. Method: In this enquiry, an eleven-item Likert-type scale was completed by two groups of academics. Group 1 (N = 52) typically reads journal articles with footnotes and Group 2 (N = 57) typically reads articles without them. Results: The result suggested that, despite wide variations, there were commonalties between these two groups of academics. Most people in both groups were positive towards footnotes and many thought that they could be easily ignored. In addition, most readers preferred footnotes, endnotes and references to be at the ends of the chapters to which they referred, rather than at the end of the book.

Writing the conclusions

Different authors in different disciplines conclude their articles in different ways. In this paper we illustrate this statement with examples and suggest that one particular way of clarifying the conclusions of articles in the sciences and social sciences is to print them using bullet points. We present as examples the conclusions from four papers with accompanying revised versions so that readers can judge the validity of this argument for themselves.

Writing an Introduction to the Introduction

Many authors give advice to students about how to write the Introduction section of their articles. Some give examples of different ways of doing this in general, and a few discuss the opening sentence in particular. In this article, 13 different types of opening sentences are outlined, and their usage contrasted in British and American journals in the Sciences and Social Sciences. Implications for teaching are considered.