George Gopen and Judith Swan write in the American Scientist (Nov/Dec 1990) about The Science of Scientific Writing. They write that complex thoughts can be made accessible and clear without minimizing their complexity if a set of structural principles are followed:

1. Follow a grammatical subject as soon as possible with its verb.
2. Place in the stress position the “new information” you want the reader to emphasize.
3. Place the person or thing whose “story” a sentence is telling at the beginning of the sentence, in the topic position.
4. Place appropriate “old information” (material already stated in the discourse) in the topic position for linkage backward and contextualization forward.
5. Articulate the action of every clause or sentence in its verb.
6. In general, provide context for your reader before asking that reader to consider anything new.
7. In general, try to ensure that the relative emphases of the substance coincide with the relative expectations for emphasis raised by the structure.

…The substance of science comprises more than the discovery and recording of data; it extends crucially to include the act of interpretation. It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot “exist” without the interpretation of each reader. In other words, writers cannot “merely” record data, even if they try. In any recording or articulation, no matter how haphazard or confused, each word resides in one or more distinct structural locations. The resulting structure, even more than the meanings of individual words, significantly influences the reader during the act of interpretation. The question then becomes whether the structure created by the writer (intentionally or not) helps or hinders the reader in the process of interpreting the scientific writing.