All right. So in this next module, we're gonna do a
little bit of practice using the colon and dash, to merge a couple of sentences.
And I am gonna kinda lead you through these practice examples.
But as I've mentioned before if you have extra time and you really want to test
yourself and really reinforce some of these concepts, it's always a good idea to
pause the video after I have shown the example and try to edit it on your own,
try to see how you use the colon and dash and then you can rejoin the video and kind
of compare to what I did. If you don't have time to do that, that's
fine, you could just watch the video right through and that's a good practice as
well. So we're gonna start with an example here.
And, we're gonna use the colon in this example to help draw, two sentences
together, make it into one sentence. And I'll give you some reasons why that's
useful here. So, it says, evidence based medicine
teaches clinicians the practical application of clinical epidemiology, as
needed to address specific problems of specific patients.
It guides clinicians on how to find the best evidence relevant to a specific
problem, how to assess the quality of that evidence, and perhaps most difficult, how
to decide if the evidence applies to a specific patient.
So, you can notice some things about this sentence, right?
So you can see that there's a little bit of, or these two sentences.
You can see there's a little bit of repetition.
So evidence based medicine teaches clinicians.
And then that's the first sentence. And the second sentence starts, it guides
clinicians on how to find. So you can see right away there's a little
bit of repetition and I talked about a couple of weeks ago this idea and I'm
gonna get back to this at the end of this week as well.
This idea that you can kind of imagine that the writer was working on this, and
they got to that second sentence and they said, "Oh, well." I already said teaches
clinicians and I don't want to repeat myself.
I'm gonna talk about repetition a little bit at the end of the week, this week.
So he says I don't wanna he or she says I don't wanna repeat myself so I'm gonna go
to the thesaurus and find another word that means teaches but isn't, you know,
it's a synonym for teaches. So you can imagine this person going to
the thesaurus and saying oh well guides oh that's good.
Okay, let me stick in guides. So it guides clinicians.
Alright we changed the word we, whew, we avoided that repetition.
Okay, so as I've mentioned before, I want you to really pay attention when you're
writing. And, if you find yourself doing that, ask
yourself the question as to whether or not you need the second instance of that word
at all. That word that you're trying to avoid
repeating. So this is one of those cases where you
actually don't need it. You don't need the guides clinicians at
all. Because really, we can join these two
separate sentences into a single sentence and just have teaches clinicians X, Y and
Z and get rid of the guides, clinicians altogether.
So that's one thing to notice about this passage.
Another thing to notice about this passage is, the second sentence is actually a list
of things, right? How to find the best evidence, how to
assess the quality, how to decide if the evidence applies.
So you've got a list here and again, as I mentioned, a colon is a good way to set up
a list. So perhaps we can, you know, use that
colon here to set up that list and draw this all into a single sentence.
And then we've got some wordiness here. Right?
You get this in that first sentence. You get as needed to address specific
problems of specific patients. So that's saying, okay, well,
evidence-based medicine is about you know, addressing specific problems of specific
patients. Okay well that's very vague.
Right? So when I read that I don't get a lot out
of that. I don't know exactly what they mean by
that. You get to that second sentence however
and they get back to the specific problems and specific patients, but now they give
you specifics about what they mean. It's about accessing evidence and things
like that. So in fact that first sentence is a vague
way of stating the second sentence. So again we just really don't need
anything. You know, if you want to delete some stuff
here, it's gonna be very easy to delete some stuff, cause there's a lot of stuff
here that we really just don't need. So evidence based medicine teaches
clinicians the practical application of clinical epidemiology.
We could get rid of all this very general vague thing and then get rid of this
guides clinicians, right? And just put a colon here and set up that
list, how to find, how to assess, and how to decide.
Right? So that's a really good use of the colon.
And then there's some other words here and there that we can probably drop and trim
up this passage of it. But that's the gist of it, the gist of
using the colon to draw this into a single sentence.
So here's my joining and condensing, using the colon.
Evidence based medicine teaches clinicians the practical application of clinical
epidemiology. Including how to find the best evidence
relevant to a specific problem. How to assess the quality of that
evidence. And how to decide if the evidence applies
to a specific patient. You can see how much better that is.
You're getting across the whole message much more efficiently, without all this
extra in the first sentence. So that's a really good use of the colon.
Here's one, another example. Oh, and one other thing I want to point
out on, on this example, you could probably cut that sentence even more.
So, for example, it originally said you know, teaches clinicians the practical
applications of clinic-, clinical epidemiology, including.
So maybe the author there I think wanted to get in that key buzzword, clinical
epidemiology, but I actually really like this better if you cut that whole that
whole thing and just say evidence-based medicine teaches clinicians, colon, how to
find, how to assess, how to decide. So you can even strip this sentence a
little bit more. All right, now, a second example this one
we're gonna use the dash to practice kinda bringing two sentences together with a
dash. So this one reads, finally the lessons of
clinical epidemiology are not meant to be limited to academic physician
epidemiologists, who sometimes have more interest in analyzing data than caring for
patients. Clinical epidemiology holds the promise of
providing clinicians with the tools necessary to improve the outcomes of their
patients. Right.
So, as you're reading that one along, you'll notice a couple of things.
So one, we've got this kind of long description, who sometimes have more
interest in analyzing data than caring for patients.
And that long, descriptive clause is kinda just thrown in there.
It might even be a little offensive to some, but I'm gonna go with what the
author's saying on the message, the authors were trying to make.
So the, this is the descriptive, plus it could actually set off by dashes.
You could set that off by dashes and use that to connect the first part of the
said, part of the sentence with the entire second sentence.
And notice that also, when you go from that first sentence to the second sentence
there's, there's no transition there. And it really is very abrupt.
It's kinda like a shift, and you're, it's a little confusing.
And so, you can get rid of the need for a transition there by drawing this all into
one sentence. So, we could set this off with dashes like
that, and kind of get rid of the separation of the two sentences.
And then there's a lot of things that you can notice in a sentence that could be
fixed. Obviously, if I have clinical epidemiology
here, and clinical epidemiology here, I'm gonna be able to you know, cross out the
clinical epidemiology in the second use of it, cause I don't, I'm over two sentences.
Now, it's a single sentence, I don't need to repeat it.
You'd notice a few other things, we get this kinda awkward phraseology, are not
meant to be limited to. It's a little bit awkward, and maybe we
can fix that up a little bit. We get this, holds the promise of
providing, well, a really short way to say, holds the promise of providing, is
just to say, provides, be direct. You get, provides clinicians with the
tools necessary to improve. Well how about just, provides clinicians
with the tools to improve? That word, necessary, is not necessary
there. And then we get this, The outcomes of
their patients. This is a case where you can get rid of a
couple of words by saying instead patient's with an apostrophe outcome, so
you dump a few words there. So there's a few ways we can tidy this up
as well as adding the dash there to join and condense.
So we'll end up with finally clinical epidemiology is not limited to academic
physician-epidemiologist-who are sometimes more interested in analyzing data than
caring for patients. We're dropping in that little extra bit
there but provides clinicians with the tools to improve their patient's outcome.
So that's a lot smoother, and again it gets the information across, much more
efficiently. One final thought on this.
I noticed that I, in the first sentence when I edit it, edited this, I actually
left in a knot and I've told you to try to get rid of knots.
I've kind of played with this one in my head and ended up deciding, well, the knot
works okay there and I didn't find an alternative that I liked better.
But probably if I worked really hard at it, I could find a way to turn that into a
positive construction and some of you may think of one.
You could something like finally clinical epidemiology extends beyond academic
physicians epidemiologists, or something like that.
There is a way to get rid of that knot. When I edited this, I actually ended up
leaving it in so, just to show you that. I've given you a lot of guidelines and
rules, and sometimes you'll violate those and decide it's okay.
But there's probably a way to turn that into a positive as well.
The preceding program is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the Leland
Stanford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.