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  1. Home
  2. Books
  3. Medical Writing
  • Cited by 12
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2009
Print publication year:
2006
Online ISBN:
9780511543517
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511543517
Subjects:
Anesthesia, Intensive Care, Pain Management, Medicine: General Interest, Medicine
Information

Book description

Effective communication is the ultimate, but often daunting, purpose of any piece of medical research. Medical Writing: A Prescription for Clarity provides practical information enabling first drafts to be turned into clear, simple, unambiguous text, without loss of individuality. Written by a medical consultant and an experienced medical editor, it is sympathetic to the problems and needs of medical writers. Like the preceding two editions, this expanded third edition deals with the basic craft of writing for publication, from spelling and grammar to choosing the best word or phrase. Whether writing a simple clinical report or thesis, wanting to supervise others, or wanting just to develop greater skill in effective writing, this book is the ideal guide and reference. Clear, simple and precise, and illustrated with apt cartoons, this is an invaluable handbook.

Reviews

‘Read this book, and make sure your students do …’

Source: British Journal of Psychiatry

‘… enough people bought the first edition to make the publishers think that a second one was profitable, and that means that Goodman and Edwards must be helping a lot of people.’

N. W. Goodman

'It is not the first, but in my opinion the best book in this field.'

Zoltán Szabó - MD PhD, University Hospital in Linköping, Sweden

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Contents

Contents
References
References and further reading
References and further reading
References
Furedi, F.Where Have all the Intellectuals Gone?London: Continuum, 2004, p. 95.
Dixon, B. (ed.) From Creation to Chaos: Classic Writings in Science. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Anonymous. Superstring theory. Lancet 1989; ii: 426–7.
Durant, J. Silver tongues and twitching eyebrows. The Times Higher Educational Supplement 25 Mar 1994, pp. 21–2.
Shuster, S.Loneliness of a long distanced reviewer. Br. Med. J. 1981; 283: 1443–4.
Perutz, M.Is Science Necessary? Essays on Science and Scientists. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1989.
Medawar, P.Memoir of a Thinking Radish. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Feynman, R. P.‘Surely You're joking, Mr Feynman!’London: Unwin, 1986.
Gregory, M. W.The infectiousness of pompous prose. Nature 1992; 360: 11–2.
O'Donnell, M.One man's burden. Br. Med. J. 1985; 290: 250.
Barrass, R.Scientists Must Write. London: Chapman & Hall, 1978.
Lutz, W. The world of doublespeak. In Ricks, C., Michaels, L. (eds.) The State of the Language, 1990 edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
Dutton, D. B.Worse Than the Disease: Pitfalls of Medical Progress. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Silverman, W. A.Human Experimentation: A Guided Step into the Unknown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Anonymous. Surrogate measures in clinical trials. Lancet 1990; 335: 261–2.
Whimster, W. F.Reading, writing – and rewriting. Br. Med. J. 1987; 294: 1011.
Anonymous. Trimming hedges. Lancet 1992; 340: 275–6.
Tinker, J. H.Book review. N. Engl. J. Med. 1994; 330: 946.
Hayes, D. P.The growing inaccessibility of science. Nature 1992; 356: 739–40.
Pickering, G.High Blood Pressure, 2nd edn. London: Churchill, 1968.
Watson, J. D., Crick, F. H. C.A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature (Lond) 1953; 171: 737–8.
Whimster, W. F. Be your own subeditor. In How to do it: 1, 2nd edn. London: BMJ Publishing Group, 1985, pp. 220–3.
MacUser 9 July 1993, p. 55.
Anonymous. Personal view: a hidden handicap. Br. Med. J. 1994; 308: 66–7.
Bloom, D. A., Mory, R. N., Hinman, F. Jr. Dilation vs. dilatation. J. Urol. 1992; 147: 1682
Aronson, J. K. “Where name and image meet” – the argument for adrenaline. Br. Med. J. 2000; 320: 506–9.
Crick, F.What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988.
Mitchell, J. R. A.Back to the future: so what will fibrinolytic therapy offer your patients with myocardial infarction?Br. Med. J. 1986; 292: 973–8.
Paton, A.Way with words. Br. Med. J. 1994; 309: 253.
Brewin, T. B.Empirical: one word, two meanings. J. R. Coll. Phys. Lond. 1994; 28: 78–9.
Burkhart, S.Sexism in medical writing. Br. Med. J. 1987; 295: 1585.
Kuhn, T.The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Goodman, N. W.Paradigm, parameter, paralysis of mind. Br. Med. J. 1993; 307: 1627–9.
Up & down the city road. The Independent Magazine, 5 Feb 1994, p. 10, col 3.
Eger, E. I. IIA template for writing a scientific paper. Anesth. Analg. 1989; 68: 740–3.
Ziman, J.Reliable Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 42.
Howard, P.Winged Words. London: Corgi, 1983.
Pinker, S.The Language Instinct. London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1994, pp. 213–14.
Dixon, B.Slide rules. Br. Med. J. 1994; 309: 1665.
Nash, W.English Usage. A Guide to First Principles. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.
Reference books
Soanes, C., Stevenson, A. (eds.) Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 2004.
Baron, D. N. (ed.) Units, Symbols and Abbreviations. A Guide for Biological and Medical Editors and Authors, 5th edn. London: Royal Society of Medicine Services, 1994.
Gowers, E.The Complete Plain Words. 3rd edn, revised by Greenbaum, S., Whitcut, J. London: HMSO, 1986.
Strunk, W. I., White, E. B.The Elements of Style. Harlow: Longman, 1999.
Bryson, , , Bill. Troublesome Words. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002.
Hicks, W.Quite Literally. Problem Words and How to Use Them. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Trask, R. L.Mind the gaffe. The Penguin Guide to Common Errors in English. London: Penguin, 2002.
Trask, R. L.The Penguin Guide to Punctuation. London: Penguin, 2004.
Albert, T. Winning the Publications Game: How to Write a Scientific Paper Without Neglecting your Patients, 2nd edn. Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2000. The author of this book runs courses for health professionals, and his website (http://www.timalbert.co.uk/) is worth a visit.
Barrass, R.Scientists Must Write, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 2002.
Huth, E.Writing and Publishing in Medicine, 3rd edn. Baltimore: Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, 1998.
O'Connor, M.Writing Successfully in Science. London: Routledge, 1991.
Carr, S.Tackling NHS Jargon. Getting The Message Across. Oxford: Radcliffe Medical Press, 2001.
Burchfield, R. W., Fowler, H. W.Fowler's Modern English Usage, revised edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Weiner, E. S. C., Delahunty, A.The Oxford Guide to English Usage, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Hayakawa, S. I., Ehrlich, E.The Penguin Guide to Synonyms and Related Words, 2nd edn. London: Penguin, 1996.
Bigwood, S., Spore, M.Presenting Numbers, Tables, and Charts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Tufte, E. R.The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Surrey: Graphics Press, 2001.
Books to read or dip into
Asher, R., Holland, R. (eds.) A Sense of Asher. London: BMJ Books, 1984. Richard Asher was one of the best and most sensible medical writers. This is not a book about how to write; it is a book that shows you how to write.
Bryson, B. Mother Tongue. The English Language. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. The story of the language, told with humour.
Burchfield, R., Simpson, J. The English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. More scholarly than Bryson.
Crystal, D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. What it says: encyclopaedic. Read about Singapore English, the great vowel shift and more.
Crystal, D. Rediscover Grammar, 3rd edn. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004. A pocket sized, travel guide to grammar.
Honey, J. Language is Power. The Story of Standard English and its Enemies. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. A political tract which asks, why, if ‘standard English’ is decried by so many as elitist, those who support standard English are so keen that everyone should learn it.
McArthur, T. Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Covers much of the same ground as the Crystal book (above) but in a more conventional format.
O'Donnell, M. A Sceptic's Medical Dictionary. London: BMJ Publishing Group, 1997. The inventor of the term Decorated Municipal Gothic.
Pinker, S. The Language Instinct. The New Science of Language and Mind. London: Penguin, 1995. Language, neurophysiology and psychology: a best seller.
Quiller-Couch, A. On the Art of Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916. (Out of print) This was a standard in its time. Current scholars are prone to complain that it is time we put Quiller-Couch away, but his chapter, ‘On the capital difficulty of prose’, given to me (NWG) by my D. Phil. supervisor, Bob Torrance, helped to set me on my way to better writing.
Truss, L. Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. London: Profile Books, 2003. Pinker (above) was a best-seller; Truss was, and still is, a phenomenon.

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