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

English Grammar and Style: Revising medical writing Reasons not rules: Backtracking, pronoun-induced Part 3 - Double syntactic unit revision and syntactic position revision - Volume 24, Issue

This is the last of this series of three articles on pronouns that cause distraction by making the reader backtrack. In the first part of this article, we examine a technique for eliminating backtracking by making two changes to the construction of…

English Grammar and Style - Points of view - Volume 23, Issue

Anu Alahari, a freelancer working in Caen, France, asks: ‘Could you please take a few minutes of your time to give your opinion on a simple language issue. Which of the following phrases is grammatically most correct? And which one would you use in…

English Grammar and Style: Points of view - Volume 23, Issue

Some more four-letter words I published a series of articles in The Write Stuff on short words frequently used in the medical and scientific context between Volume 16(3) 2007 and Volume 18(4) 2009. Since then, at training courses and in email…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 24, Issue

In this issue •  We continue Michael Schneir's fascinating series on distractions in medical and scientific writing, this time concentrating on non-pronoun-induced backtracking with adverbs, verbs, and nouns. This sounds a little…

Good clinical practice (GCP): A universal call for ethics in biomedical research - Volume 23, Issue

Today, the principles of good clinical practice (GCP) form such an integral part of the development of new medicines that they could easily be taken for granted. Yet, the road to a universal code of ethics in human experimentation is paved with…