材料工程专业英语---UNIT NINE-LESSON ONE.ppt

UNIT NINE INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PAPER WRITING
LESSON ONE FUNDAMENTALS OF PAPER WRITING (I)
Almost all research papers are expositions. The word exposition quite literally means to set forth a subject. It appeals to the understanding and it is the mon kind of writing, for it is applicable to any task that challenges the understanding--the definition of a word, the way to a street address, the structure of a plant, the mechanism of a watch, the cause of a historical event, the meaning of a philosophy. When we study the methods of exposition, we are not following an arbitrary scheme, we are following the ways in which we ordinarily observe and reason about our world. We are doing systematically something that ordinary living, in its hit-or-miss fashion, forces on us, quite naturally, all the time.
A piece of exposition may be regarded as the answer to a question. If a specific question has been asked--"Why are you majoring in chemistry? " or "What were the causes of the American Revolution?"--it is rather easy to frame an answer that does not waver too badly from the point. The question controls the answer.
In a discussion of any length monly find more than one question involved. There is the main question, which represents the main interest, but to get a satisfactory answer to that, perhaps other questions must be asked and answered along the way. So we encounter again the problems of unity and coherence.
waver from偏离
The main question must govern the whole. And we may think of the answer to the main question as giving the proposition, the thesis, the governing idea of the discussion. For instance, a historian, in answering the question "Why did it occur?" about the American Revolution, e up with this answer to serve as his proposition: "The causes of the American Revolution were primarily economic." He might proceed to do a book offering a very elaborate analysis of the background of the event, but this proposition would control the whole book.