Nearly a quarter of a century ago I left the security of a well-paid and well-pensioned position to go on a mission to show doctors how much they – and their patients – would benefit from knowing the simple techniques of effective writing. As an editor on medical magazines for a decade, I had been surprised by much of what I had seen: winding texts of long and pompous words brought together in rambling sentences that obscured any sensible meaning. Here was a great opportunity, I thought, to pass on what I had learnt as a professional writer: that the best way to express clear and well-ordered thoughts was through clear and simple language. I was confident that within a year or two the culture would start to change, and instead of glibly trotting out phrases like Long term medication is predicated, doctors would start writing: You may have to take these pills for a long time.

To my surprise I met fierce resistance. ‘You can’t use simple words; they are for children’; ‘Approximately is a proper scientific word; it would be wrong to write about’; ‘Don’t put We examined the patient; instead write, The patient was examined.’ One exasperated public health doctor went so far as to say: ‘We’re doctors. We don’t necessarily want people to understand what we are writing’. At this point I might well have given up had I not started to come across, like pioneers straggling in from the wilderness, one or two others who independently were seeing the same problems and dreaming the same dream. Prominent among these were the authors of the first edition of this book, which a reviewer in my own little newsletter hailed as an ‘original, absorbing, comprehensive, compact, practical manual, worth every penny’ (W. Whimster. Curing gobbledegook. Short Words, Spring 1993, p. 3).