A Clarity Clinic for Surgical Writing

Although writing and publishing are key to career development and academic success for surgeons, learning the skills needed to write publishable research reports is an often neglected aspect of surgical training. This report distills several lessons from scientific writing courses for surgeons taught at the University of California, San Francisco, to give a wider audience of academic surgeons tools they can use to write scientific prose more clearly. Drawing extensively on real examples of surgical writing, we cover techniques that are indispensable for achieving clarity, including choosing words carefully, designing well-constructed sentences, building structured paragraphs, and displaying your thinking clearly by using topic sentences and transitions.