Tom
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They told me that if your reader can't understand your opening sentence, he's not going to read the rest of it, and if your reader doesn't read it, what's the point of writing?

I read Science and NEJM every week, and I couldn't figure it out the first time I read it.

This would be a good example for a writing course.

As I explained in the edit box, you can't define a word in terms of other words that your readers don't understand. If they don't know what "aneuploid" means, they're unlikely to know what "monoploid" means.

And providing a link for the unfamiliar word is no excuse. Every professional editor I know agrees that you can't do that. You have to include everything in the work itself that your reader needs for a basic understanding of your point. That's why I was glad to see that Wikipedia agreed in WP:NOTJOURNAL.

I hope I didn't drive [that user] off Wikipedia. Most people don't enjoy having their writing changed. I don't usually enjoy it myself. But an ordinary reader has to understand a Wikipedia article -- at least the introduction.

-- Nbauman 09:59, 25 April 2015 (UTC) [1]

Hurrah!! Emboldened by this I am off to make a change to the Epidermis article. It begins "The epidermis is a stratified squamous epithelium". Well that clears things up!

--LookingGlass (talk) 06:51, 15 May 2016 (UTC)