A survey of writing techniques, authorship, tenses, voices and length of opening sentences of medical research articles

Abstract

A large number of genre analyses have investigated schematic units or "moves" of many parts of medical research articles. The present analysis deals with the inner element of the first move, the introduction section. It explored the techniques for writing the opening sentences, and investigated authorship, tenses, voices, and sentence length. The subjects were 167 opening sentences from two world journals in medical science, the "Annals of Internal Medical" and "The Lancet", which represent American English and British English respectively. A concordancing computer program was used to form sketches of the writing techniques and tenses. The voices were initially identified by the concordancer before they were manually assessed. The length of each opening sentence was determined using the Microsoft Word. It was found that there were most used techniques for writing the opening sentence: "giving facts" (53.89%), "including importance" (14.37%), and "using a combination of fact and importance" (24.55%). The majoriy of the first sentences in both journals were composed by citation of previous works (60.48%). It was found that most opening sentences were written in the present simple tense (70.06%), followed by the present perfect tense (17.37%), and other tenses (12.37%). It was also found that most of these opening sentences (77.84%) were in the active voice. Finally, these initial sentences consisted of about 21.89 words, with a maximum of 70 and minimum of 5 words. The findings of this study suggest that most opening sentence, which comprise an average of about 22 words, give facts in the present simple active by citation of previous findings.