Words Matter

Words matter!

©FSRH J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2010: 36(2) Background What have the Royal Society of Health – 350 years old this year – the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care and the Department of Health’s (DH) new campaign, ‘Sex. Worth Talking About’, got in common? The Royal Society was set up to assist and promote the accumulation of knowledge, promote clarity of expression, and d...

Words matter: increasing the implementation of clinical guidelines.

OBJECTIVES To determine whether writing clinical guideline recommendations in behaviourally specified "plain English" language increases the likelihood of their implementation by service users (patients). DESIGN Randomised controlled trial in which participants received either the original text of the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) public guidelines for the management of sc...

Last Words: Empiricism Is Not a Matter of Faith

“Hurrah, this is it!” you exclaim as you set down the most recent issue of Computational Linguistics. “This Zigglebottom Tagger is exactly what I need!” A gleeful smile crosses your face as you imagine how your system will improve once you replace your tagger from graduate school with the clearly superior Zigglebottom method. You rub your hands together and page through the article looking for ...

Words matter: a proposed nosologic lexicon for sleep breathing.

Words, words, words

‘Words, words, words.’ This was Hamlet’s reply to Polonius’ question, ‘What do you read, my lord?’ (Shakespeare, 1603) [1]. By repeating the word three times, Hamlet suggests that what he is reading is meaningless. Before launching the journal Archives of Public Health, we have asked ourselves: ‘Do we not already produce too many words too many journals?’ or in other words ‘What is the added va...