Wendy Kingdom

Section Editor - Good Writing Practice

Wendy has more than 30 years’ experience of clinical research and medical writing in the pharmaceutical industry. She has been working successfully as a freelance medical writer since 2002 and specialises in clinical and regulatory documents. Wendy has been a workshop leader at European Medical Writers Association (EMWA) conferences since 2002, and she provides commercial and academic training on medical writing. Wendy was EMWA Education Officer 2003–2005, served on the EMWA Professional Development Committee (EPDC) for 5 years, and was Treasurer of EMWA from 2005–2009.

info@wendykingdom.com

Contributions

Good Writing Practice - Volume 33, Issue 3

Section Editors: Wendy Kingdom, Amy Whereat   Results section of a journal article Author: Michael Lewis Schneir   Medical Writing. 2024;33(3):112. https://doi.org/10.56012/rpfd6138

Good Writing Practice - Volume 33, Issue 2

Section Editors: Wendy Kingdom, Amy Whereat   Methods of a journal article Author: Michael Lewis Schneir Medical Writing. 2024;33(2):98. https://doi.org/10.56012/tbyq9909

Good Writing Practice - Volume 33, Issue 1

Section Editors: Wendy Kingdom, Amy Whereat Syntactic alternatives and distractions: Title to a journal article Author: Michael Lewis Schneir, PhD Medical Writing. 2024;33(1):110. https://doi.org/10.56012/xjow9091

Good Writing Practice - Volume 32, Issue 4

Section Editors: Wendy Kingdom, Amy Whereat Syntactic punctuation distraction Slash: usage and misusage Author: Michael Lewis Schneir Medical Writing. 2023;32(4):86. https://doi.org/10.56012/qlrn907

Good Writing Practice - Volume 32, Issue 3

Author: Michael Lewis Schneir Section Editors: Wendy Kingdom, Amy Whereat Syntactic punctuation distraction Comma: Over-usage Part 2 Coordinated noncore sentence constituents are likely to be disrupted by unnecessary comma punctuation. Medical…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 32, Issue 2

Syntactic punctuation distraction Comma over-usage probably results from a tendency to pause and emphasise. How ever, such intuitive punctuation is counterproductive to the coordination of sentence core constituents, the intent of which is to cohere…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 32, Issue 1

Syntactic punctuation distraction This article explores the problem of omitted commas in the structure of certain  sentences. Contributors: Michael Lewis Schneir (author), Wendy Kingdom (section editor), Any Whereat (section editor) Medical…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 4

Contributors: Michael Lewis Schneir, Wendy Kingdom (section editor), Any Whereat (section editor) Syntactic punctuation distraction - Michael Lewis Schneir Medical Writing. 2022;31(4)84-85. https://doi.org/10.56012/tbjp1682

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 3

Contributors: Michael Lewis Schneir (author), Wendy Kingdom (section editor), Amy Wheareat (section editor) Syntactic grammar distraction usage or misusage: Definite article Michael Lewis Schneir Medical Writing. 2022;31(3)94-95.…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 2

The indefinite article a functions as a determiner before a singular count noun, either tangible (a human) or abstract (a trait). This determiner indicates that the noun is either being mentioned for the first time or is general (indefinite) in…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue 1

The present participle using and the past participle based on, both traditionally adjectivals, ostensibly misfunction without a noun to modify (a modifee). The frequency of their usage and misusage in research writing justifies a separate article…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 4

Grammatical misagreement in function: Modifier to modifee Knowledge of the grammatical function of a modifying syntactic unit facilitates understanding a misfunctional distraction and, in turn, its revision option.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 3

The distinction between the active and passive voice is that the subject acts by means of the active voice verb, and the subject is acted on by means of the passive voice verb.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 2

Introduction In this regular feature, the misagreement in tense is extended from present and present perfect tense (discussed in the previous edition of MEW) to an analysis of the frequently used present participle (of the participial phrase) and…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue 1

Grammatical misagreement in tense I – Present, present perfect Introduction Each of the sections of a journal article contains anticipated conceptual components, which can be expressed by a specific verb tense for the perspective of time and the…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue 4

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 29, Issue 3

The misagreement in number (singular vs. plural) between subject and verb is caused by subject number ambiguity, either intrinsic (the subject itself) or extrinsic (the effect of subject modification).

Good Writing Practice - Volume 29, Issue 2

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 29, Issue 1

The absolute phrase contains a noun headword and a present participle.

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue 4

The repetition of a word becomes more distracting (i.e., redundant) in proportion to increased number. The word may be considered as individual (e.g., the’s in a title) or as a constituent of a larger syntactic unit (a phrase or clause).

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue 3

Excessive post-noun modification, usually as adjectival prepositional phrases, occurs fre - quently in research writing. Occurring less frequently, and less distracting, is excessive prenoun adjectival modification (i.e., stacked modifi cation). The…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue 2

Paragraph lengthiness and complexity cause a continuity inexplicity (discontinuity), which can be lessened by using forecasting and backcasting markers of the information pattern. Thus, omission of such continuity markers (e.g., a subheading)…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 28, Issue 1

Ellipsis is the absence of a portion of a syntactic unit in a stylistic effort to be succinct. For example, the ellipsis of that, in a noun clause occurring frequently in research writing, often is only a minor distraction (e.g., Smith hypothesised…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue 4

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 2

Backtracking distracts paragraph order by inducing re-reading previous text. Such backtracking is a more serious distraction when it occurs between sentences than within sentences, because the distance between a referent (pronoun or synonym) and its…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 27, Issue 1

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue 4

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 26, Issue 3

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…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 26, Issue 2

Introduction Dissonant nonparallelism occurs in two patterns of comparison: the typical adjective-based pattern (x is similar to y; there is more x than y) and the less common correlative conjunction-based pattern (the more x…the more y). In this…

Medical Communications - Volume 24, Issue 1

Dear all, A very warm welcome to the first issue of Medical Writing in 2015! This whole issue is dedicated to a subject very close to my heart (as I'm sure you're all well aware of by now) – plain language. Naturally, everyone benefits from text…

Out On Our Own - Volume 23, Issue 3

Making the leap to become a freelancer is daunting enough, but once established how do we ensure our business has staying power? Thank you to our experienced freelancers who share their top tips for longevity. Never let it be said that OOOO is…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 23, Issue 1

The purpose of the articles in the Good Writing Practice section is to focus on style, not on punctuation or grammar. However, apostrophes are a stumbling block for many writers and so require some discussion. Some people have simply not learned how…

Editorial: Pharmaism - Volume 22, Issue 4

Criticising the pharmaceutical industry is a type of sport, and it is astonishing what nonsense people will believe about it. For example, it has been said that pharmaceutical companies will only conduct a clinical trial against another product that…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 22, Issue 3

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 22, Issue 2

Good writing practice is not a formal set of rules about how to write, like the requirements of GCP or GMP. Our aim is to highlight that the focus of all writers should always be on their readers, and that writers should make their texts as easy as…

English Grammar and Style - Volume 21, Issue 3

Good Writing Practice As an editor, I have been battling against verbosity, redundant modifiers, and ‘buzz’ words for many years. New terms and turns of phrase or new meanings for words pop up all the time. Many of them have come with the…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 21, Issue 1

The Good Writing Practice initiative was launched in the December 2010 issue of TWS1 by Alistair Reeves and Wendy Kingdom. The aim is to go beyond the classic style guide and provide advice on practical aspects of writing that make texts easier to…