Public health: write more better

A couple years ago, Steven Pinker took to the Chronicle of Higher Education to lay out Why Academic Writing Stinks — though the content is unfortunately behind a paywall.

Academic writing is up there in the pantheon of crimes against the written word, with government writing, legal writing, and anything that proceeds “click here to accept these terms and conditions” as company.

Public health ought to accept its share of blame for these crimes. Too often, our field’s writing is bogged down by the mistakes of academic and scientific writing: hamfisted sentence construction, a debilitating reliance on the passive voice, and an allergy to clear, direct statements.

These failures are significant because in public health, our writing is often an attempt to get important information into the hands of people who need it. We want them to understand, we need them to understand. But if we don’t make this information clear, easy to understand, and easy to use, then guess what? People don’t use it.

And when people don’t use it, they don’t get their shots. They put their car seat in wrong. They don’t know how to check the label. They don’t make good decisions about difficult, hard-to-understand things like health care, or difficult everyday things like diet and exercise.

(Of course, in Neoliberalism’s Challenge to Public Health, I argued against public health work that relies on affecting acute behavior change, but thanks for bearing with me through these examples.)

We know that there are a million barriers to people taking necessary actions to improve their health, and the health of their communities. Bad transit options make people choose the sedentary comfort of their car. Their car spews particulate matter into the air, causing a range of problems from asthma to autism, and vehicle crashes kill 35,000 people per year in the United States. Poor wages and long hours make people choose cheap, convenient food. Fear, misinformation, or plain-old inconvenience make people avoid important vaccines, and preventable diseases get a resurgence.

The things that affect health behavior combine into a topographical map, and when we design routes to healthy behavior we have to make sure that they are not uphill journeys. Our information shouldn’t be unnecessarily hard to understand. Make health easier for people, and let’s start with what we can most closely control — the information we offer to the public.