Please Read the Following Paper and Write This Way!

Gary D. Friedman

American Journal of Epidemiology

After dealing with many wordy manuscripts submitted to the American Journal of Epidemiology and badgering authors to shorten them, I was delighted to receive the 2,164-word paper by Lewis et al. (1) that is published in this issue. If you are an aspiring author of epidemiologic papers, please read their paper, which is a model of conciseness and clarity.

It has been my experience that, on average, the British write and speak more clearly, using fewer and shorter words than Americans. However, American English can be both clear and simple, and we would like to see more examples of good writing from epidemiologists of all nationalities. Regrettably, since my editorial, "Be Kind to Your Reader," was published in 1990 (2), as a whole the manuscripts we receive have not improved.

Shorter papers provide at least two advantages. First, they are less apt to be taxing or sleep-inducing to us decision-making editors and our readers. Although our official limit is 4,000 words, one member of our editorial board has commented that papers with over 3,000 words are often boring. I agree. Second, we have a strict fixed limit on published pages. Therefore, if papers were shorter, we would not have to turn down so many good submissions.

Unfortunately, current epidemiologists’ tendency toward wordiness seems to have extended to grant writing. In the "good old days," our applications were funded when we listed our specific aims in a few sentences or phrases. Now, my younger colleagues are wary of submitting a grant in which specific aims do not also contain a sales pitch and occupy a whole page. They also fear that, if they clearly describe their study in 16 pages rather than all or almost all of the 25-page limit imposed by the National Institutes of Health, many peer reviewers will take a dim view of the application.

Many of us complain that we are short of time to do all that is required of us and all that we would like to do. Since reading of epidemiologic papers is an important consumer of our time, let’s do ourselves a favor and write succinctly.


    REFERENCES
 TOP
 REFERENCES
 

  1. Lewis SA, Antoniak M, Venn AJ, et al. Secondhand smoke, dietary fruit intake, road traffic exposures, and the prevalence of asthma: a cross-sectional study in young children. Am J Epidemiol 2005;161:406–11.[Abstract/Free Full Text]
  2. Friedman GD. Be kind to your reader. Am J Epidemiol 1990;132:591–3.[ISI][Medline]