Interlude: Ease, Experimentation, and Plain Language

I often talk about the #1 principle in scientific and medical writing: make the reader's job easy.

I recently read an article that described how making the reader's job easy is influenced by thrust and drag.

"Every article has thrust and drag. The thrust of a piece is what motivates readers to invest the energy necessary to extract its meaning... Drag is everything that makes the reader’s task harder, such as meandering intros, convoluted sentences, abstruse locution and even little things like a missing Oxford comma.

When your writing has more thrust than drag for a group of readers, it will spread and your audience will grow. Achieving this takes practice and experimentation."

I think this concept also applies to scientific and medical writing. You want to maximize thrust (ie, motivation and persuasion) and minimize drag (ie, confusion and frustration) for your readers. And mastering this art takes dedicated practice and experimentation.

I also like the idea of experimenting with writing, but not just because it relates to experiments in research. I think experimenting with text sounds like much more fun than revising text.

What do you think?

Now onto this week's round-up...

💌 Round-up 

📆 Upcoming

Harness the Power of Plain Language to Enlighten Clinical Experts – September 27/29, 2023
I'm so excited to facilitate a workshop for the Master of Science in Clinical Investigation program at Vanderbilt University. We'll be discussing my favorite topic: the value of using plain language principles to enlighten expert readers.

👓 Reading

​Scientists who don’t speak fluent English get little help from journals, study finds​
"Out of the 736 journals surveyed, only 2...stated in their guidelines that manuscripts would not be rejected solely on the grounds of perceived English quality... Meanwhile, of the 262 journals whose editors-in-chief were surveyed, only 6% instructed reviewers not to base their assessments solely on language proficiency."

🧰 Tools

​ORCID​
"ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. You can connect your iD with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more. You can use your iD to share your information with other systems, ensuring you get recognition for all your contributions, saving you time and hassle, and reducing the risk of errors."

💬 Quote

“Getting good at communication—particularly written communication—is an investment worth making. My best advice for communicating clearly is to first make sure your thinking is clear and then use plain, concise language.” –Sam Altman

💭 Thoughts

Editing is a lot like doing research. Through experimentation and discovery, you test words and phrases until you unearth meaningful content.
 

📝 Experiment

The next time you struggle with how to write a sentence, write multiple versions, hitting return in between each version. Then read each version out loud and choose which sentence sounds clearest.

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal