: Re: In English non-fiction, should I try to place the important parts at the beginning of the sentence? Main question There is a claim that I heard from a few persons (none of which were native

@Sent2472441

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No, that's not a valid rule. Real life is more complicated than that.

Sometimes we deliberately leave the most important element in the sentence until the end to build tension. Like the classic style of line in a mystery novel, "And so, the murderers is the man who had the most to gain by the victim's death, the only man who could have entered the room that night without raising suspicion, the man with the brown shoes, the man with the fake British accent, that man is ... you, Fred Jones!" If we started the sentence with, "The murderer is Fred Jones", the rest would all be boring side notes rather than building tension.

Of course it doesn't have to be as dramatic as revealing the name of the killer. Even in a technical paper you might write, "We tried three approaches and only the last one worked: radiometrics, stratigraphy, and seriation". Even if the final revelation is not surprising in the sense of open-mouthed astonishment, you create a little build up.

In many sentences, when there is flexibility in the word order in a grammatical sense, i.e. the sentence would still be grammatically correct with several different possible orderings, we still choose the order based on real-world logic. For example, we often express ideas in chronological order. If I said, "Today I had breakfast, got a haircut, went to the grocery store, and took a nap", listeners would generally assume that I did them in that order, barring some reason to believe otherwise.

Often we start with the information that provides the background to what follows. Like I might say, "There are three routes to Detroit from here: You can go through Toledo, Chicago, or Montreal. We decided to go via Chicago." I'd be less likely to say, "We decided to travel via Chicago. It is one of three routes to get where we were going, the others being through Toledo and Montreal. We were headed to Detroit." The second paragraph is confusing because it's not clear where you're going -- geographically or linguistically -- until you get to the end. The first is more logical.

Et cetera. There are lots of considerations. Give the sentence a logical flow rather than worrying about some arbitrary rule like "put the most important thing first".

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