We have criticized medical writers, but praise is due to those who write well, and there are many who do. It is not so easy to find their writing because there are not the indicators to good writing that there are to bad. We started our dissection of style with Watson and Crick’s description of DNA (see p. 25), but their article is now 60 years old. With kind permission of the author and of the publishers, we reproduce here a Viewpoint from the Lancet from 2013 that is a model of clarity. We are not asking you to read some deep theory about an arcane disease interesting only to a handful of sub-specialists. It is an essay about type 2 diabetes, a condition so common and important that it will interest almost all medical writers. Now, of course, most research projects are of only limited interest, but the writers’ messages would come across better by reflecting the succinctness and flow of this essay rather than the polysyllables and discursion of too many research articles.

The essay is reproduced here in full, after which we make comments. But a preliminary comment is that the essay does not start by telling us that type 2 diabetes is a disease of epidemic proportions: the author wastes no words telling us what we already know; he tells us right away what he wants to say. And a general comment is to note, as you read through, how few of the words and constructions that appear in our index appear in the essay.