I began to study Japanese as a college student at Waseda University in
Tokyo. There, I fell in love with the Japanese language and culture. But
although most of my friends studied Japanese literature and philosophy, I
studied science. I was fascinated by Japanese research, but I also found that
a lot of that research was not presented well in English. As a result, most of
the rest of the world did not have access to the valuable work that was being
done in Japan.
After university, I studied Japanese further and began to do medical
translation into English. Of course, I had to improve my Japanese, and soon I
realized that my English writing skills were insufficient, too. So, I did a lot of
studying, especially of medical writing, to make my translations as clear and
understandable as possible.
Soon, I began to help Japanese authors with their English writing. I
discovered that most of them thought in Japanese (usually complex and
complicated Japanese) when they wrote in English. As a result, much of their
English writing was complicated, and international readers couldn’t
understand it. Sometimes the authors didn’t even understand their own
English.
I began to teach them to write clear, simple English. Once they could
understand their own writing more easily, their readers could understand it,
too. That was the beginning of my thinking about 3Cs (Clear Concise
Coherent) English as my goal for international medical writing. I wanted to
write 3Cs English myself, and I wanted to teach that style of writing to my
Japanese students.
The 3Cs relate to the text as a whole, not to vocabulary. Medical vocabulary is
generally precise, clear, and widely understood by specialists around the
world. As a result, we don’t need to fix vocabulary. However, English grammar
should be as clear and simple as possible. Fortunately, you can use several
grammar techniques to make your English sentences easier to understand. In
this book, Tom and I identify 12 such techniques. We call them “edits”
because they are editing techniques. We think that applying these 12 edits
can help you to achieve the 3Cs. We believe that this practice will help you to
1) think more clearly about what you want to say and 2) say it in a form that is
more likely to be understood by your reader. The result should be writing that
is clearer, more concise, and more coherent.