Sir

It would be interesting to know the accessibility score for G. D. Gopen and J. A. Swan's paper ”The science of scientific writing“ (Am. Sci. 78, 550–558; 1990), cited in your News Feature about clarity (Nature 423, 376–378; 2003). I use this article in a course I teach. Although it makes some useful points, the students and I think it is overlong and full of unnecessarily complicated words and long-winded sentences.

Writing workshops are great but not widely available. As an alternative, I highly recommend the workbook Essentials of Writing Biomedical Research Papers by Mimi Zieger (McGraw-Hill, New York, 2000) — it works!