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This article appeared in the Spring 2000 edition of Short Words, the newsletter of Tim Albert Training. It was written by Katharine Whitehorn.

Do they read the fine print?

Katharine Whitehorn has been judging the written communication skills of doctors

Is it just the words that count? Or do the sentences, the grammar, the layout, the way the thing looks matter too?

Last year I was one of the judges in the BUPA-Patients Association competition for a prize in medical communications. The good news is that there were four dozen entries, so people are trying to make themselves understood. The bad news is that one after another was astoundingly hard to read.

For a start, the type was often too small. I suppose someone had said 'not more than six pages', so to get their words into that length they had simply downsized it -too bad if you needed a magnifying glass to read it.

One or two, disarmingly, had put everything in nice big sixteen point for the judges, and then showed us what they had given the patients, which was in ten point.

Layout matters too, as does the order in which you put things Medical papers may sketch in a background, describe research and arrive at a conclusion, so doctors may read the last paragraph first.

But patients may not do it this way, and if the first sentence doesn't grab them they may never get to the second. In The Front Page, the editor asks the journalist where he has mentioned the name of the newspaper. 'That's in the second paragraph'.

'The second paragraph. Who reads the second paragraph?'

It was depressing how bad the grammar of some of the BUPA entries was. I can't believe a doctor has gone through all that education without knowing that you don't put an apostrophe in 'their's', or before a plural as in 'letter's', or that where you put 'only' in a sentence can alter its meaning.

Either whoever typed in the copy didn't know, and the doctors hadn't corrected it, or (can you believe it?) the doctors simply didn't see what they had written.

I blame word processors and computers. It all looks so splendid, and the authors assume that the spell check and the grammar check will make things immaculate. And so they can - to an extent.

But the grammar checks are presumably written by the same set of morons who write their useless manuals, and tend to make opinionated suggestions. It once told me not to write 'woman' but 'person' when she was going to have a baby in the next sentence for heaven's sake.

And, of course, doctors can overestimate how much patients know. In the words of the great Sydney Jacobson of the Daily Mirror, you should 'never overestimate their knowledge, and never underestimate their intelligence'.

Katharine Whitehorn is a journalist.

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