: 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

@Vandalay250

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No. The familiar information should be placed first, and the important new information should be placed last. These two positions are the most prominent places in a sentence. And placing familiar information first creates a connection from one sentence to another that greatly improves the readability of prose.

This article, The Science of Scientific Writing by Gopen and Swan, shows how to take impenetrable scientific prose and, using a few guidelines like the one I give above, make it much more readable. I quote from the article:

It is a linguistic commonplace that readers naturally emphasize the material that arrives at the end of a sentence. We refer to that location as a "stress position."

There are several good reasons that you usually don't want to put the important information in the other prominent position, at the beginning of the sentence. One reason given by the article:

Beginning with the exciting material and ending with a lack of luster often leaves us disappointed and destroys our sense of momentum.

The authors call the start of a sentence the topic position:

The information that begins a sentence establishes for the reader a perspective for viewing the sentence as a unit: Readers expect a unit of discourse to be a story about whoever shows up first.

And here is their advice about what should be in these two positions:

Put in the topic position the old information that links backward; put in the stress position the new information you want the reader to emphasize.

So the new, important information in a sentence should be at the end.

However, if the sentence ends with a list, the "stress position" would start at the beginning of the list, and my intuition says the start of a list is the most prominent place in it. So your second sentence with "sample impurities due to an uneven opularseny of the Earth’s magnetic field, comtorsognation, and palamnesis" may be preferable. But the best way to phrase that sentence might be to add words that move the stress position to the end of the list:

Possible explanations include comtorsognation, palamnesis and, in the authors' opinions the most plausible, sample impurities due to an uneven opularseny of the Earth’s magnetic field.

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