Writing style guide
A note about our readership: Please write in a clear, direct, and active style. The Community Eye Health Journal is an international journal, and most of our readers do not have English as their first language. Our aim is to help ophthalmologists, ophthalmic nurses, ophthalmic assistants, optometrists, general doctors, and other health workers to practice better eye care, and to understand and think about approaches to public health. GrammarUse the active voiceWrite in the active voice. The visiting team of researchers trained the ophthalmic nurses. Rather than: The ophthalmic nurses were trained by the team of visiting researchers. Use the first person where necessary. During my recent visit to the United Kingdom, I saw nurses competently using sophisticated equipment. Rather than: During a recent visit to the United Kingdom, nurses were seen to competently use sophisticated equipment. Keep sentences short.Make sure your essential point is not buried within a long sentence. Two short sentences are preferable to a long sentence with embedded clauses. We seek to reduce visual decay to a rate that is compatible with the patient’s sighted lifetime. Progression, however measured, has therefore become the key parameter. It should be the primary outcome of any new trial. Rather than: Because we seek to reduce visual decay to a rate that is compatible with the patient’s sighted lifetime, progression, however measured, has become the key parameter, and should be the primary outcome of any new trial. Avoid noun clustersRather than creating a noun cluster, try to write things in full. Patients with diabetic retinopathy Rather than: Diabetic retinopathy patients Studies in schools for blind children Rather than: Blind school studies Clinics with limited resources in developing countries Rather than: Developing country resource-poor clinics He/sheAvoid using ‘he’ as a general pronoun. Make the nouns (and pronouns) plural, then use ‘they’. If that’s not possible, use ‘he or she’. Surgeons may be keen to convert to sutureless cataract surgery, but they may not be sure whether their surgical skills meet the criteria to master this more difficult technique. Rather than: A surgeon may be keen to convert to sutureless cataract surgery, but he may not be sure whether his surgical skills meet the criteria to master this more difficult technique. Ask the patient to look at the smallest line he or she can see on the near chart. Rather than: Ask the patient to look at the smallest line he can see on the near chart. Singular or plural?
Watch out for misrelated clausesMake sure the related clause and the main clause share the same subject. Having joined the eye care team, the ophthalmic assistant was first assigned the task of identifying patients for cataract surgery. Rather than: Having joined the eye care team, the first task of the ophthalmic assistant is to identify patients for cataract surgery. (The task did not join the eye care team, the ophthalmic assistant did) PunctuationCommasTry using as few commas as possible, but use commas before the ‘and’ and ‘or’ in lists: The key stakeholders from the Ministry of Health, local NGOs, international donors, and hospital administrators were invited. Use commas on both sides of parenthetical clauses or phrases, and with commenting clauses. All new vessels in the eye, whether retinal or choroidal, grow in response to angiogenic factors. Know the difference between defining clauses (no comma) and commenting clauses (commas needed): Defining clause: Junior team members who are afraid of appraisals often think they are going to be told off. (Some junior team members are afraid of appraisals) Commenting clause: Junior team members, who are afraid of appraisals, often think they are going to be told off. (All junior team members are afraid of appraisals) Note that, when a comma is used, both main clauses must have a subject: The staff attended a team-building workshop, and they felt more motivated afterwards. The staff attended a team-building workshop and felt more motivated afterwards. HyphensFor usage in CEHJ, please refer to the list in the A-Z list of terms. Common hyphenated words in CEHJ include: co-ordination, community-based, evidence-based, follow-up (noun), cost-recovery, ready-made spectacles, etc. Non-hyphenated words include: slit lamp, policy makers, intraocular, etc. Use a hyphen with prefixes like non- (non-clinical) and anti- (anti-metabolites), and with suffixes like -type and -like (flu-like). Compound modifiers preceding a noun need to be hyphenated: open-angle glaucoma, angle-closure glaucoma, etc. However, do not hyphenate adjectival compounds beginning with an adverb ending in -ly: a newly discovered treatment, a frequently made error, etc. This treatment enables long-term control of intraocular pressure (hyphen) But: This treatment enables intraocular pressure to be controlled in the long term (no hyphen) Use hyphens in spelt-out numbers from twenty-one to ninety-nine: twenty-three, one hundred and thirty-eight, etc. Note that hyphens are used to connect numbers and words, whether numerals or written out, as in 28-year-old woman (e.g. twenty-eight-year-old woman) Use hyphens in fractions: one-third, two-fourths, etc. No spaces on either side of a hyphen: 150-200, 17-27 February, etc Quotation marksUse double inverted commas for reported speech. Full stops and commas go inside double quotation marks. The programme co-ordinator said “We aim to increase the cataract surgical rate.” Use single inverted commas to enclose an unfamiliar word or expression, or one to be used in a technical sense. Full stops and commas go outside single quotation marks. The term ‘outreach’ as it is used today… The fibrovascular membranes are classified either as ‘classic’ or ‘occult’. Exclamation marksNo exclamation marks, except in quotes from other sources. Full stopsNo full stops in initials (JB Collins, AB Shah, ...) or abbreviations (WHO, ECOWAS, ...). Italic and bold typesRegular bold type is used in CEHJ to emphasise words: They provide information about what community members can do to improve eye care, but they do not focus in detail on how this can be achieved. Foreign words should be in italics, with the exception of common Latin expressions like de facto, in situ, vice versa, etc. A few madaris provide basic health care services to their students. Book titles and journal names quoted within an article should be in italics, although they are not italicised within the list of references. The State of the World’s Sight provides an insight into what has thus far been achieved in the prevention of visual impairment. The titles of journal articles quoted within an article should be between single quotation marks. In ‘Global data on visual impairment in the year 2002’, Resnikoff et al. emphasise the need to address uncorrected refractive errors, a frequently overlooked public health issue relevant to all age groups. Spelling and vocabularyEnglish spellingCEHJ uses English spelling. Please refer to the list of terms A-Z list of terms. aetiology Use s-spellings: minimise CapitalisationPlease make minimal use of capitalisation. Use capitals only for names and proper nouns. There are no spaces or full stops between capitals in a name (JB Collins). Don’t capitalise names of studies. The early manifest glaucoma trial (EMGT) was designed to address the effectiveness of lowering pressure in overt disease. AbbreviationsWrite the expression in full the first time, followed by the abbreviation in brackets. Do not use full stops between capitals: Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). There are many people in the population with raised intraocular pressure (IOP) but no glaucoma, and people with glaucoma without raised IOP. Preferred vocabularyYou should avoid referring to patients as diseases or disease cases. Remember that one does not give anaesthesia, but anaesthetic. Anaesthesia is a state. The nurse administers anaesthetic, and the patient is then under anaesthesia. Below are a few examples of preferred terms, but please refer to the list at the end of this section.
Technical termsDrugsDrugs should be referred to by their approved non-proprietary names, and the source of any new or experimental preparations should be given. Scientific measurementsScientific measurements should be given in SI units, except for blood pressure, which should be expressed in mm Hg. Always leave a space between the figure and the unit, e.g. 8 mmol/l. PercentagesWrite ‘per cent’ in full, except in the case of drug formulations, e.g. povidone iodine 5%. CurrencyPlease give the equivalent amount in US $. For cataract surgery Rs. 600 (roughly US $13) per eye is collected to meet the cost of travel and food. NumbersNumbers up to ten are spelt out, except when they express a measurement with a unit (8 mmol/l) or age (6 weeks old), or when in a list with other numbers (25 nurses, 11 nursing assistants, 3 ophthalmologists). When at the beginning of a sentence, numbers are always spelt out. Seventy-three outreach interventions were identified, and 12 of them met the inclusion criteria. Raw numbers should be given alongside percentages and as supporting data for p values. Only 85 per cent (n=159) of GPs completed the tele-survey from start to finish. Lists and tablesNo full stops in tables.No full stops in lists of bullet points except at the end. Do not capitalise the first letter of each bullet point. The courses offered are:
ReferencesReferences to articles should be identified by numbers in the text and listed at the end of the paper in the order in which they first appear in the text. Note: Please use plain text for references – do not use footnotes (in Word) or EndNote. At the end of the article the full list of references should follow the Vancouver style, but without any italics. Give the names and initials of all authors, unless there are more than six. When there are more than six authors, only the first six should be given, followed by ‘et al.’. References to journal articlesThe authors’ names are followed by: the title of the article; the title of the journal abbreviated according to the style of Index Medicus; the year of publication; the volume number; and the first and last page numbers. 1 Rossetti L, Marchetti I, Orzalesi N, Scorpiglione N, Torri V, Liberati A. Randomized clinical trials on medical treatment of glaucoma. Are they appropriate to guide clinical practice? Arch Ophthalmol 1993 Jan;111(1): 96-103. References to booksReferences to books should give the names of any editors, place of publication, editor, and year. 2 Kolb H, Lipetz LE. The anatomical basis for colour vision in the vertebrate retina. In: Gouras P, ed. The perception of colour. 2nd ed. London: MacMillan Press, 1991: 128-45. References to electronic sourcesElectronic citations are referenced with their URL and access date, and as much other information as is available. Electronic journal articles: 3 Godlee F, Pakenham-Walsh N, Ncayiyanana D, Cohen B, Packer A. Can we achieve health information for all by 2015? The Lancet published online July 9, 2004 http://image.thelancet.com/extras/04art6112web.pdf (accessed 26 August 2004). Websites: 4 VISION 2020: The Right to Sight. Developing an Action Plan www.v2020.org/media_releases/V2020_Toolkit.asp (accessed 7 July 2005). Databases: 5 Friedman DS, Vedula SS. Lens extraction for chronic angle-closure glaucoma. Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2006; Issue 3. Art. No.: CD005555.pub2. DOI: 10.1002/14651858. References to personal communications or unpublished manuscriptsInformation from manuscripts not yet in press, papers reported at meetings, or personal communications should be cited only in the text, not as a formal reference. Position of reference numbersReferences numbers go:
Researchers complained that it would be unethical in a trial to randomly allocate patients with overt disease to a control group with no intervention6; however, as Smith et al. pointed out,7 they had to confront the ethical reality that the effectiveness of treatment was uncertain.8 |
