In this issue of Medical Writing - Volume 23, Issue

Some of you might remember the old days when writing was done with a typewriter, spreadsheets were big pieces of paper, and slides were printed on film. Thanks to computers, these are old memories, and we can all be much more productive. Software…

Editing for writers who have English as an additional language - Volume 27, Issue

Editors of English are typically met with expectations to make a quick fix of documents that need more radical changes than authors think. As editors, we should convey how we work to improve readability, and either adjustor gain acceptance for our…

Medical Writing in Japanese: Writing medical documents in English while thinking in Japanese - Volume 33, Issue

To be or not to be – Are medical and scientific writers of non-native English origin at a disadvantage? - Volume 26, Issue

Medical Writing in Russian: From Russian to English and back again - Volume 33, Issue

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

English Grammar and Style - Volume 22, Issue

We have three articles in this edition. Pamela Haendler's contribution deals with the medical writer as a reviewer and quality checker. Because of their close involvement with all of the documentation on a project, the medical writers involved are…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 21, Issue

Pleasing the reader The fundamental principle in the practice of medicine, ‘first, do no harm’, could be transposed to the world of medical writing to ‘first, do not annoy’. The Good Writing Practice (GWP) group at EMWA has been focussing on…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 23, Issue

Pronouns are useful referents (i.e. the thing doing the referring) to avoid repetition of words (usually nouns). Although personal pronouns (he, she, and I, in particular) are infrequent in medical writing, the neutral ‘it’ and the demonstrative…

English Grammar and Style Revising medical writing Reasons not rules: Backtracking, pronoun-induced Part 2 – Single syntactic unit revision - Volume 24, Issue

This is the second of a series of three articles on pronouns that cause distraction by making the reader backtrack. In this article, we examine a technique for eliminating backtracking by making a single change to the construction of the sentence.…