Language and style

This branch covers the wording of a medical text, and a reader chooses here by what a question is about: the standard the language as a whole is held to and the stance its claims carry, or the unit of language at issue, from the single word up through the sentence, its grammar and punctuation, and the paragraph, to the style authority that settles a dispute and English used across languages. Who the reader is and how plainly to write for them is left to writing for the reader, the editing, proofreading and consistency passes to revising and reviewing a document, and carrying a text into another language to medical translation.

• What clear and precise scientific language is held to — truthfulness, precision and clarity together, the three C's for a scientific paper, and why published prose is a poor model to copy
• Accuracy and stance — matching confidence to support, separating facts from opinions, values and assumptions, wording that carries the severity you mean, and a tone the reader can trust
• Words and terms — choosing the word, technical terms and their definitions, abbreviations, capitals and names, and the words used about people
• Sentences — building a sentence, word order, attachment and ambiguity, active and passive voice and verbs buried in nouns, and conciseness and sentence reduction
• Grammar — verb agreement, pronoun case, relative clauses, the indefinite article, the order of adjectives, modal verbs and mood, and conditional statements
• Punctuation — commas, stops, brackets, dashes and spacing, apostrophes, hyphens and compound words, and ranges and slashes
• Paragraphs and flow — the paragraph and its examples, backtracking and continuity between sentences, and deictic words
• Style manuals and disputed usage — what an edition contains and when it dates, which manual binds you, how far a manual is an authority, settling a usage, punctuation or grammar question against evidence, a preference against a change in meaning, contested rules as house decisions, and when consistency stops helping the reader
• English across languages — writing in English for an international readership, a term that means something else in the reader's language or system of medicine, the English sentence pattern from another first language, supporting authors who write in English as an additional language, and writing for translation and localisation