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Clarity in Writing
"Being Clear in Medicine"

A Techstyle Group Resource     
November 4, 2005     

Excerpt from the November 4, 2005
Fifth International Conference on Plain Language Washington DC

Laurel Prokop's presentation — Being Clear in Medicine.
Program Guide (See Speaker Bio - p.19)

Note: An extended handout of her Powerpoint™ presentation is available in Acrobat™ format. It contains additional examples and slides.
(Download link to the left)

Several examples below offer suggestions for clarity in your writing. Bookmark this page and visit us often.

Examples and practice

In medicine, you expect to see a chemical diagram of a pharmaceutical drug. This defines the elemental assembly that constitutes the drug's unique character. The elements, links, and bonds must be exact. Any change results in a change in the drug. It is no longer what you expect.

Consider this commonly prescribed antidepressant, Prozac:

Medicine, as all sciences, demands precision, clarity, and an expected reaction to what is created. If someone synthesizes a drug, like fluoxetine hydrochloride (Prozac™), it must be exact—following strict rules and order.

Writing is no different—especially formal writing. It too is a science. Learn the rules and anticipate what your audience expects.

The chemical structure we see under "Science. Medicine." represents a pharmaceutical known by the brand name Prozac™. It is a graphic model of the molecule—the compound's atomic elements and their positional relationship to each other. It shows the bonds or "chemical links" they form.

A sentence diagram, like that pictured under "Science. Writing." is similar to the molecular picture. In a sentence diagram, the elements are words. The structural components that form the sentence are represented by words aligned with intersecting lines drawn horizontally, vertically, or at 45-degree angles. These are "bonds."

Locations, connections, and angles of these words—governed by the rules of grammar—indicate the parts of speech the words form. They show the sentence organization and presentation — the syntax. If your sentence model is incorrect, the meaning of your sentence will be unclear or ambiguous to your reader.

Diagramming a sentence is a good way to ensure that all words play the right role and are in the right place and in the right "case." For example, you can establish that

• you have a subject and a predicate
• your modifiers are in the right place—modifying the terms you want them to describe
• if you use pronouns, they relate clearly to antecedents
• your phrases and clauses are built and positioned appropriately in the sentence
• if you have prepositional phrases, you will know that any pronoun you use as an object of the preposition must be in the objective or accusative case
• you'll be able to see why the form of "who" in a subordinate clause should be "who" or "whom" (it'll act as a subject or object)

The punctuation that you use in a sentence is analogous to the connectors or "bonds" in a chemical compound. Commas, semi-colons, periods, colons, quotation marks, and so on are like the variety of chemical bonds. They tell your reader how your words relate to each other, when your reader should pause or stop, and what material is special or quoted.

Where Did Sentence Diagramming Come From?

We'll cover more on sentence diagramming later. If you have questions on this or any topic on clear writing, please see our contact options or email
clarity.info @ techstyle.com
(Note: for email you must have the word "clarity" in the subject line).

This system of sentence diagrams can be found in Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg's An Elementary English Grammar (1878).

Copyright Notice

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