Given before new

Claim: a sentence starts from what the reader already has (the topic, or what the previous sentence ended on) and ends on what is new.

• Grade: supported with caveat.
• Evidence: psycholinguistics (strands 4 and 5), against.
• Check: sentence-links (syntax, weekly): consecutive sentences share a noun or point back.
• Reader styles: none override it.

What it asks

• Open a sentence with a word that links it to the one before; put the new information last, where the stress falls.
• Keep the same entity as the subject across consecutive sentences when they are about it.

Why

A sentence is judged understood sooner when its given part has a direct antecedent, the given-new strategy (Haviland & Clark 1974: three small experiments, a self-timed button press). Five reading-time experiments found the entity linking a sentence to the previous one read best as the subject (Gordon et al. 1993). Gopen & Swan 1990 turned this into writing advice for scientists: topic first, stress position last.

Limits

The practitioner version was never tested as a whole (Gopen & Swan 1990 report no controlled study).