Doctors are a drain on society: Cambridge Orthopaedic Writing Prize by Richard Villar

"It is a natural assumption that authors who have published numerous scientific papers have also acquired mastery of the written word. Yet sadly this is not always the case. Talk to many journal editors and they will say that a number of the submissions they receive fail because an interesting finding has simply been presented in a poor way. The Cambridge Orthopaedic Writing Prize was created to allow freedom of written expression and to encourage trainees, authors, writers – call them what you will – to have fun, to play with their language and, at the same time, to compete. The end game, of course, is for the quality of scientific submissions to improve; for entrants to realise that you can influence a reviewer’s judgment simply by improving the language and presentation of submitted research. There are no prizes for hopeless complexity. How can one expect a reviewer to focus on a paper that is badly written? Not a hope. Reviewers are human, too. For the 2013 prize, the judges were bowled over with the professionalism and content of the submissions. Each one, in their view, was utterly brilliant."