User talk:Nrnittur

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Hello, Nrnittur, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Ian and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Ian (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:27, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Premature rupture of membranes

When you make edits like this [1] I'd like you to bear in mind the audience that Wikipedia caters for. This is a general encyclopedia, not a medical work, and for that reason we have a page WP:JARGON that explains how we try to write technical articles, and I'd especially like to draw your attention to this: "Do not introduce new and specialized words simply to teach them to the reader when more common alternatives will do." There is also an editing guideline at Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable #Write one level down that should help you understand the level at which you should pitch your writing.

In specific terms, here's a comparison between parts of the article Premature rupture of membranes before and after your edit:

Before	After
Most women will experience a painless gush of fluid that leaks out of the vagina. Sometimes women notice a steady leakage of small amounts of watery fluid rather than a distinct "gush".	Most women will experience a painless leakage of fluid out of the vagina that may either present as a distinct "gush" or a steady flow of small amounts of watery fluid in the absence of steady labor contractions.
Other symptoms include a change in color and consistency of fluid coming out of the vagina, flecks of meconium (fetal stool) in the fluid, or a decrease in the size of the uterus.	Loss of fluid may be associated with the fetus becoming easier to palpate (due to loss of surrounding amniotic fluid), decreased uterine size, or meconium (fetal stool) seen in the fluid.

Ask yourself will a lay editor be familiar with the terms "present" (instead of "notice")? Will the average reader understand "easier to palpate" or "amniotic fluid"? Now, I understand that you're trying to expand the information in that section, but if you've made it difficult for most people to understand, then you've made the article worse, not better.

Please revisit that edit and try to re-write it so that you would expect a reasonably bright high-school student without any medical background to be able to understand what you're writing, without having to look things up in a dictionary. Please feel free to ask if I've not been clear about anything. --RexxS (talk) 22:56, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

Hi! Thank you very much for your suggestions. I have taken them into account and tried to shift some of the terminology to more lay-person wording as you suggested. I was trying to restructure the phrasing in this section as I found the original sentences to be almost word-for-word from the textbook it was being cited from. Nrnittur (talk) 18:15, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

You're most welcome. Thank you for the changes: they improve the comprehensibility a lot. Sometimes there are only so many way that you can write a fact, so close paraphrasing can be a problem, as you realise. Quite often, though, rephrasing the medical jargon is sufficient to make the text sufficiently different. --RexxS (talk) 19:31, 7 November 2017 (UTC)