Science, clearly.
Although there are many guides to writing, copyediting and proofreading, structural editing (or ‘edit1’) is harder to define and explain. At its heart, it is about the audience. The aim of an edit1 is to make sure the audience can quickly and easily grasp the information you are presenting; a logical, intuitive structure helps you to achieve that.
Making health content digital offers several advantages.
The transition to digital is especially interesting when it comes to health content. The traditional (historical) world of health professionals involved bulky textbooks, verbose journal articles and printed guidelines that could easily go out of date without the user even realising.
A friend recently joked that it was ironic that the ACT Writers Association couldn’t get the apostrophe right, when the National Farmers’ Federation could.
Is she right?
It turns out that some phrases and titles that look like they might need an apostrophe actually don’t.
Almost every website, brochure or poster has that familiar phrase at the end: ‘For further information …’.
But is more information necessarily better?
It may seem to be a poor business model, but at Biotext we sometimes find that we have better results when we don’t give clients what they want.
If you publish content for the web, chances are you’ve come across SEO – search engine optimisation.
Research into the readability of text tries to quantify how effective a piece of written language is in communicating a message to the audience and to understand what makes some texts more difficult than others.
Many organisations use ‘readability’ – how easily a reader can understand text – as a guiding principle in their publications.
Listening to your audience and understanding what they want to know are crucial to effectively communicating with them.
Biotext is the proud developer of the Australian manual of scientific style (AMOSS), now published in partnership with Macquarie University.
AMOSS is the essential guide for anyone producing scientific or technical information. It provides practical and expert guidance to help you write, edit and present.