Adding and listing

Continuing the same thought

To show that you are adding something to a thought that you have already introduced, start the next sentence with a word like moreover, furthermore, or in addition:

(1)

Driving while distracted increases the risk of personal injury; furthermore, it endangers the lives of other drivers.

(2)

Local suppliers are sometimes perceived as being a less reliable, which is true in some cases. On the other hand, local suppliers tend to be more appreciatedamong clients and staff. In addition, working with local businesses promotes a prosperous community and local suppliers often provide higher quality and lower prices. Therefore, we recommend investigating the reliability of local suppliers.

The word besides

Take care when using besides. Used alone, it has a conversational tone. It has a more formal tone when followed by a noun phrase or an ing-form (3b). The linking phrase in addition has a more formal tone (3c).  

Informal:

(3a) Learning from human demonstrations is challenging. The learner agent does not have access to human actions to clone its behavior. Besides, robot arms and human arms have many differences, which introduces a large domain gap.

More formal:

(3b) Learning from human demonstrations is challenging. The learner agent does not have access to human actions to clone its behavior. Besides this problem, robot arms and human arms have many differences, which introduces a large domain gap.

(3b) Learning from human demonstrations is challenging. The learner agent does not have access to human actions to clone its behavior. In addition, robot arms and human arms have many differences, which introduces a large domain gap.

Showing chronological order

It is a good idea to use the adverbs such as next, then, firstly, and lastly to clarify chronological order, as in examples (4) and (5) from two Method sections:

(3)

The parts were then designed in detail in the CAD-software Autodesk Inventor in 3D and drawings were created of all components needed. Lastly, a bill of material was made to enable the company to buy all components needed to assemble a functional prototype.

(4)

At the beginning of each interview, the interviewer introduces himself to the interviewee. Next, the interviewer starts by describing the goals and ethical considerations of the research.

'Lastly' or 'at last'?

Use lastly for sequencing, not at last. At last means that you “have been impatient as a result of long delays”, according to the Cambridge Grammar Dictionary , as in At last, we managed to get the machine to work.

Showing order of importance

Example (5) shows how firstly, secondly and thirdly can also be used to indicate an order of importance, or simply highlight the items in a list:

(5)

Moreover, the stimulations were not strong enough to cause any effect on the vergence due to three main reasons. Firstly, the project was under a time constrain which prohibited us to take our time to create high quality scenes. Secondly, the games were not created by professionals, which might explain why they did not cause any strong effect on the subjects. Thirdly, there is a lack of existing virtual reality videos on the internet, for example optic illusion videos or VR high quality rotational videos.