Writing for readers

D. A. Rew, Southampton University Hospitals, Southampton, UK

A fog has settled on scientific English. Well-written English effortlessly communicates the writer’s intent to the reader. Unfortunately, far too often, science is written in a form which renders the content hard to understand, and which makes unreasonable demands on the reader. English is a very flexible and fault tolerant medium of communication, and good writing is helped by a number of simple rules of structure. These recognise the form in which the human brain is optimised to take in written information. Short, active sentences, concise choice of words and the ruthless elimination of redundancy serve the reader far better than long paragraphs, tortured sentence structure, passive sense and subsidiary clauses.

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