The source of the information must remain anonymous.
Common complements include:
The results of this experiment remain a secret.
Their decision represents a turnaround.
The patients appeared to be immune to the HIV virus.
Predictions for next year look increasingly uncertain.
You can put a noun or adjective complement after the object of some transitive verbs. This complement describes the object, and is called an object complement.
They cannot keep the options of both politics and terrorism open.
Television scored significantly higher amongst those who found politics interesting.
Some analysts do not consider it a virus.
Ordering and connecting your message
There are several ways of using language to hold your whole message together and to give it meaning. The first step is to arrange content into a recognizable pattern. When you are planning a piece of work or a talk, you can use the following pattern to sequence your ideas:
describe a situation
The following sections describe techniques for ensuring that your writing or speech holds together well, and that both your intention and your message are clear:
Using grammatical structures and vocabulary to ‘signpost’ your intention
There are several ways in which you can use grammatical structures and vocabulary within a section of text to express the following ideas:
arrangement of events in time
If you want to show that one thing happened soon after the other, you can use a finite verb in the main clause, and an -ing participle in the subordinate clause:
They headed rapidly for the Channel ports, showing their passports at the barriers.
You can also indicate the order in which things happened using ordinals and adverbs such as first, then, later, etc.
Later, in December 1985, the committee decided …
procedure
You can use the same structure – a finite verb in the main clause, and an -ing participle in the subordinate clause – to show how something is done.
Researchers determined the size of each machine, taking into account the properties of the material.
cause/effect
The same structure can be used to show that one thing happened as a result of another.
Many of the men returned home, causing local unemployment.
Note that you can also indicate cause and effect in a main clause using a verb such as cause, lead to, or result in, or a noun such as effect, result, or outcome.
The consumption of an excessive number of sweets can cause obesity.
The effect of the famine in 1921–22 was devastating.
comparison and contrast
You can compare and contrast information in the following ways.
Conversely, the effect of intravenous administration of the drug is immediate.
By contrast, the more recent publication is more straightforward.
Owner-controlled companies performed better than those subject to management control.
The aim of this report is to compare and contrast these two business structures.
We will compare our own findings with those of Mortimore et al. (1988).
These findings contrast strongly with those from other tests.
for and against
You can provide an evaluation leading to a conclusion in the following ways.
This method of production is preferable.
Consumers prefer our products for their quality and finish.
This type of surgery has the advantage that no abdominal incision is needed.
This type of organization should be much smaller, since it will not need personnel concerned with line management.
You must take as much care as possible, in order to avoid accidents.
Referring back and referring forward
The most common way of making a text hold together is to refer back to something that you have mentioned earlier, by using pronouns, demonstratives, determiners, and adjectives (see 10.2 to 10.39). It is also common to refer forward, particularly in longer texts (see 10.40 to 10.47).
referring back
This and those are common in academic contexts:
…they had commissioned a specific piece of research. This came somewhat late.
There were, however, wide differences of opinion about party chances. Some of those differences…
Note that the demonstrative is often linked with a noun referring to:
That’s a good question.
This view is also held by Rey and Stiglitz (1988).
During this process, cracks appeared in the limestone.
This situation continued for almost two decades.
As this research has shown, customer brand loyalty is very hard to achieve.