Doctors, nurses, paramedical workers and medical scientists need to communicate their ideas effectively. Writers in the field of medicine tend to use unfamiliar words in tortuous constructions, particularly when writing reports for submission to learned journals. Research can often be judged only by its final written report. A meticulous study can be let down by poor writing, which may lead a reviewer to wonder if lack of attention to detail in the writing indicates lack of attention to detail in the research. Certain usually superfluous words and phrases occur again and again in medical papers. Once able to recognize these, writers should be able to delete them or to find more appropriate constructions, guided by the suggestions made in this book.

Most of the examples are quotations from medical books and journals, though some, particularly those from more specialized texts, have been modified.

Words or phrases whose use in medical writing is discussed specifically in the text are in capitals:

1. (a) where they occur as the ‘heading’ to a main entry, i.e. where the discussion takes place;

2. (b) in cross-references to main entries, for example ‘(see regime)’;

3. (c) in the index.

Superscript numbers in the text refer to articles and books listed sequentially in the reference list at the end of the book. There is also a list of the standard texts to which we refer frequently, and these texts are identified by author’s name or by an obvious shorthand: for instance, Greenbaum and Whitcut are the latest revisers of Sir Ernest Gowers’ The complete plain words, and this is referred to as Gowers. COD is the Concise Oxford Dictionary. OED is the CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary.