There are important differences between writing and speaking. Spoken information needs to be padded, repeated in different ways, given a number of different emphases; all help the audience to follow the speaker’s ideas. When reading, readers read at their own pace, stopping and re-reading as they need to (although the need for a lot of re-reading indicates a lack of clarity): the padding is not necessary.

The following examples of the most common superfluities in medical writing would mostly seem inelegant even in speech. Yet they easily slip past the glazed eyes of the hard-pressed reader as part of ‘scientific convention’. After reading, or better, writing a few pages from which the excess has been cut, one soon develops a taste for this type of surgery. The outcome of excision is shorter, clearer text with a sense of coming to the point.

HAS BEEN SHOWN TO

HAS BEEN FOUND TO

WAS NOTED

These constructions, which occur in a number of variations and tenses – have been shown to be . . ., had been found that . . ., is noted to be . . . – can usually be omitted or replaced by a simple verb. We applaud the simple verbs show and found instead of demonstrate and exhibit, but they have a tendency to become compound verbs: the giveaway is the attachment of to. Found – unsurprisingly – is a common word in medical articles: about one in every 1000 words. A quarter of those occurrences are in found to, and two thirds of those are in found to be. Shown is a less common word, but a third of its occurrences are in shown to of which nearly half are in shown to be. On Ngram, found and shown both occur half as frequently as in PubMed®, and fewer than a tenth of the occurrences are attached to to.