说章法,无非是起承转合。写毛笔字,也有起承转合,怎么提笔,怎么转角,怎么收笔。写文章也一样,怎么开头,怎么发展,怎么有了冲突,怎么结尾。很多人说,这不就是八股文了吗?是的,这就是八股文。写一般文章,能把八股文的套路弄通就绰绰有余了,不是任何文体都要表现你那看似独特实则不堪的个性。科研文章就是典型的八股文,照着一定的套路写,最少可以到达“可读”的水平。可惜,就连这个水平,大部分人都写不出来。中国人有写不出来的,德国人、英国人、日本人,一样儿有。今天就用Nature上一篇文章(Speyerer et al., 2016,Nature 538)的摘要做例子,说一下起承转合这种写中文文章的技法也可以用来写英语学术论文。为了方便讨论,我把这个摘要一句话拆成一段的样子,并且编上序号。
[1] Radom bombardment bycomets, asteroids and associated fragments form and alter the lunar regolithand other rocky surfaces.
[2] The accumulation ofimpact craters over time is of fundamental use in evaluating the relative agesof geologic units.
[3] Crater counts andradiometric ages from the returned samples provide constraints with which toderive absolute model ages for unsampled units on the Moon and other SolarSystem objects.
[4] However, althoughstudies of existing craters and returned samples offer insight into the processof crater formation and the past cratering rate, questions remain about thepresent rate of crater production, the effect of early-stage jetting duringimpacts and the influence that distal ejecta have on the regolith.
[5] Here we use LunarReconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) Narrow Angle Camera (NAC) temporal(‘before and after’) image pairs to quantify the contemporary rate of craterproduction on the Moon, to reveal previously unknown details of impact-inducedjetting, and to identify a secondary impact process that is rapidly churningthe regolith.
[6] From this temporaldataset, we detected 222 new impact craters and found 33 per cent more craters(with diameters of at least ten meters) than predicted by the standard Neukumproduction and chronology functions for the Moon.
[7] We identified broadreflectance zones associated with the new craters that we interpret as evidenceof a surface-bound jetting process.
[8] We also observe asecondary cratering process that we estimate churns the top two centimetres ofregolith on a timescale of 81, 000 years—more than a hundred times faster thanprevious models estimated from meteoritic impacts (ten million years).
写东西,不要由着性子胡写,要让文字载着自己的思维顺畅地留到目的地,不要哐哐哐地打直角,或者说半截子话。每一句话都要能在前一句找到根据,每一句话都有对后一句做出提示和安排。也就是说句句有来自,句句有着落。文章有了章法,首先气度格局就在,至于个别字句是否表达的妥当,其实无关宏旨,一般读者并不会觉得你用“generally”、“generally speaking” 以及“it is general that”等等有什么区别,因为它们可能本来也没有什么区别。
【附注】这篇文章受惠于Celesta Brenneka博士的写作课。她上课借鉴的主要思路就是George D. Gopen的《Expectation》。这本书从读者期待看到什么的角度出发,讲解我们在写东西的时候该怎么办。也就是说,作者是要关照读者的。书好像挺贵的,不过要是看了这本书写的论文基本盘面过得去了,总比回回都请人帮忙改省钱吧!