Lay summaries and writing for patients: Where are we now and where are we going? - Volume 28, Issue

We examine the trend for increasing and more transparent patient information and ask how close we have come in the last few years to producing useful and meaningful information for patients. We also outline the challenges faced by medical writers…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue

Syntactic Structure - Inter-sentenceIncrementalism: SentencesInter-sentence incrementalism is an expansion of information, often secondary, into a sentence rather than a reduction of the information to a clause or phrase and incorporation (sentence…

Medical Writing in Portuguese: English to Portuguese translation: Know your audience! - Volume 33, Issue

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue

Nominalisation is the transformation of a precise verb into another sentence constituent, usually a noun (nominalisation), sometimes an adjective (adjectivalisation). This syntactic transformation elicits the grammatical necessity to add…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue

Circumlocution is the usage of a multiword structure instead of a shorter syntactic unit, for example, usage of a clause instead of a phrase. The distraction consequence of circumlocution can be sentence pattern disruption and unintended…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue

In addition to subject-verb misagreement in grammatical number, a misagreement in number is common between a subject and other sentence constituents, which appears in the experimental and contextual sections of a journal article.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue

Conceptual component omission is a distraction to a content expert who expects specific argumentative conceptual components in the various sections of a journal article. As evidence, some of the components have become standardised in structured…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue

An adjective clause displaced from its modifee by an intervening syntactic unit is a distraction. Another distraction is the vague adjective clause that seems to refer to an entire sentence rather than to a definite modifee. Such vagueness…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 25, Issue

Coordination non parallelism is the lack of structural symmetry between coordinated sentence constituents that are intended to be equivalent in importance. A classic example of such non parallelism is “I love fishing, swimming, and to run.” In this…

Addressing vaccine hesitancy in writing - Volume 27, Issue

Since the infamous article by Wakefield et al. was published in 1998, diseases once nearly eradicated are re-emerging. As a result, research has focused on communication strategies that can successfully combat vaccine hesitancy. Current research…