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The threads of writing

US Bureau of Reclamation, Denver, USA

Corresponding author: kmahrer@do.usbr.gov

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

Threads run through documents and hold them together. What are the threads? Simply, threads are topics. They are found by compiling, in order, the (grammatical) subjects of neighboring sentences and clauses. For example, if you underline all the subjects within a paragraph, this assemblage will group into topics. Easy-to-follow writing usually has one, two, or, at most, three easy-to-identify threads running through and, possibly, interwoven within the paragraph. Disjointed, hard-to-follow writing has more and, here, more may include isolated threads (i.e., a subject that lacks threading to preceding or proceeding subjects), or no, or very little discernable thread structure. Identifying and unraveling the thread structure of a document and adjusting to make it consistent can be an important editing tool.

Here is an example I adapted from the first paragraph of an article Physics Today ("Lorentz invariance on trial," July 2004). To stress my point, I specifically chose a topic that can bring smart people to their knees—Einstein relativity and Lorentz invariance.

Expecting to measure different speeds, in 1887 Michelson and Morley performed an experiment on light in different reference frames that gave null result. In terms of the physics concepts prevalent at that time, it was surprisingly difficult to explain these results; fundamental changes were required in the notions of space and . . . [Full Text of this Article]