Life science and health information often has to delivered to audiences least able to understand it, the mark of a good writer is making sure the content is clear and clean and can be understood by anyone with an 8th grade education.
When long complicated words, concepts and formulae are part of the text, the audience is likely to have a lot more education than 8th grade, but the writer still needs the audience to understand.
In 2001 I was privileged to start being given contracts to work with a bona fide genius and inventor, Pennsylvania cardiologist Dr Kenneth R Kensey. He had a theory that he died demonstrating: we are prone to strokes and heart attacks because our blood is filled with sludge and sludge builds up in our veins and can block them off or break off.
The physiology made perfect sense: reduce the thickness or viscosity of our blood and our blood moves linearly and more efficiently. The main cause of blood viscosity is a high hematocrit, which means that the more red blood cells you have, the more the traffic jam in your blood.
So too with documents. Documents are conduits for words to transmit data and ideas from one brain to another, but can be horribly clogged with too many words and sentences misshapen.
