Writing readable prose

Writing readable prose

T he purpose of a scientific paper is to communicate results and analysis to the wider scientific community. The better a paper is written, the more readers it will attract and the more citations it is likely to receive. This alone should be sufficient to convince any scientist to put significant effort into his or her writing; unfortunately, this is rarely the case. More than a decade ago, Mar...

Maintainable JavaScript - Writing Readable Code

Tips for Writing Readable Articles

s are best written after the facts, once you actually have something to abstract: write down the key points (for example by listing each paragraph’s first sentence), tie them together, add an opening sentence, then edit drastically. Sometimes, though, you may have to write and submit an abstract to a conference long before the paper is written or the research even carried out. Such promissory a...

Writing and designing readable patient education materials.

Functional illiteracy is a problem often overlooked by nurses. Although the average adult in the United States cannot read above the eighth-grade level, most patient education materials are written on a high-school or college reading level. If patients cannot read educational materials, then there is little hope of them using or understanding the information. Strategies for improving the readab...

Writing science: the abstract is poetry, the paper is prose.

EXPRESSIONISM I’m going to suggest that the four-part, quatrain model of the scientific abstract or IQ has served its term. What’s been missing all these years was an important, fifth subsection: The CONTROLS, the obvious, the critical, the perfect CONTROLS! Time’s come to expand the microcosm of the abstract: The cosmos according to Hubble Expands like the soap of a bubble. Let’s hope it’s not...