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Neville W. Goodman, DPhil
University of Bristol Bristol, England

JAMA. 1995;273(14):1087-1088.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—There are books on medical writing in which the techniques of clear writing are illustrated by rewriting examples of published medical prose. My own book is one.¹ Zieger's book² is the most comprehensive that I know of. If articles in the Annals of Internal Medicine are little easier to read after peer review and editing,³I suggest it is because editors are too busy to rewrite whole manuscripts. I am led even more to this conclusion because manuscripts were 2.6% longer after editing, and every manuscript I have ever edited has ended up shorter.

Dr Roberts and colleagues³ wrote: "Both the Gunning and Flesch scores are based on sentence and word length. One might then conclude that these indexes are not valid for medical writing [because of Latin words and neologisms].... But it is just such characteristics that editors criticize as detrimental to . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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