276
care over
the
abstract/summary, which is all many of
your colleagues will read and which it is easy to construct badly.4 Now underline your hedges and rewrite the paper without them, paying special attention to shields and the passive voice. Finally, replace the hedges you think are essential. Your rhetorical caution is now deliberate and purposeful, not defensive and ill-considered. Hand the final draft to a willing medical student or colleague whose first language is not English. Note carefully any source of confusion. Rewrite and post. F. A genre-based and text-type analysis of hedging in written medical English discourse (1980-1990). INTERFACE: J Appl Linguistics 1991; 6: 33-54. 2. Gould SJ. How does a panda fit? In: An urchin in the storm. London: Collins Harvill, 1988: 20. 3. Sheehan MP, Rustin MHA, Atherton DJ, et al. Efficacy of traditional Chinese herbal therapy in adult atopic dermatitis. Lancet 1992; 340: 13-17. 4. Salager-Meyer F. Discoursal flaws in medical English abstract: a genre analysis per research- and text-type. Text 1990; 10: 365-84. 1.
Salager-Meyer
Stapled
anastomoses and colon
cancer recurrence
A report by Akyol and colleagues1 suggested that the use of stapled anastomoses in colorectal cancer surgery lessened recurrence rates and cancer-related mortality by up to 50%. At first glance these figures are surprising since previous surveys showed that local recurrence rates with stapled anastomoses are either higher than2,3or similar to4-6 those with sutured anastomoses. However, many of the earlier reports were of small, unrandomised, or retrospective series. Akyol et al studied 294 patients who had undergone ostensibly curative colorectal cancer resections; sutured and stapled anastomoses had been considered equally feasible at operation. Unlike previous researchers, they randomised only after the resection had been completed; this approach presumably equalised the possibility of tumour clearance in the two subgroups. Individual surgeons contributed a similar number of sutured and stapled anastomoses to distribute evenly the influence of surgeon variability on local recurrence rates.4 By the end of the second year after surgery, overall tumour recurrence was 29-4% in the sutured group and 19-1% in the stapled a reduction of 42% (95% CI group (p
care over
the
abstract/summary, which is all many of
your colleagues will read and which it is easy to construct badly.4 Now underline your hedges and rewrite the paper without them, paying special attention to shields and the passive voice. Finally, replace the hedges you think are essential. Your rhetorical caution is now deliberate and purposeful, not defensive and ill-considered. Hand the final draft to a willing medical student or colleague whose first language is not English. Note carefully any source of confusion. Rewrite and post. F. A genre-based and text-type analysis of hedging in written medical English discourse (1980-1990). INTERFACE: J Appl Linguistics 1991; 6: 33-54. 2. Gould SJ. How does a panda fit? In: An urchin in the storm. London: Collins Harvill, 1988: 20. 3. Sheehan MP, Rustin MHA, Atherton DJ, et al. Efficacy of traditional Chinese herbal therapy in adult atopic dermatitis. Lancet 1992; 340: 13-17. 4. Salager-Meyer F. Discoursal flaws in medical English abstract: a genre analysis per research- and text-type. Text 1990; 10: 365-84. 1.
Salager-Meyer
Stapled
anastomoses and colon
cancer recurrence
A report by Akyol and colleagues1 suggested that the use of stapled anastomoses in colorectal cancer surgery lessened recurrence rates and cancer-related mortality by up to 50%. At first glance these figures are surprising since previous surveys showed that local recurrence rates with stapled anastomoses are either higher than2,3or similar to4-6 those with sutured anastomoses. However, many of the earlier reports were of small, unrandomised, or retrospective series. Akyol et al studied 294 patients who had undergone ostensibly curative colorectal cancer resections; sutured and stapled anastomoses had been considered equally feasible at operation. Unlike previous researchers, they randomised only after the resection had been completed; this approach presumably equalised the possibility of tumour clearance in the two subgroups. Individual surgeons contributed a similar number of sutured and stapled anastomoses to distribute evenly the influence of surgeon variability on local recurrence rates.4 By the end of the second year after surgery, overall tumour recurrence was 29-4% in the sutured group and 19-1% in the stapled a reduction of 42% (95% CI group (p
