The following features are designed to serve the student’s needs and adapt the book to the abilities of most beginning college students.

Brushing Up
Each chapter opener page (beginning with chapter 2) has a "Brushing Up" box which lists concepts from earlier chapters that the reader should understand before embarking on the new one. It helps to tie the organ systems together and show their relevance to each other. It also serves as an aid in courses that teach the systems in a different order from the one presented here, and for students returning after an absence from college who may need to refresh their memories of some concepts.

Objectives and "Before You Go On" Questions
Each chapter is broken down into typically three to six major sections, framed between a set of learning objectives at the beginning and a set of review questions ("Before You Go On") at the end. Blocking the chapters out in this manner makes it easier for a student to plan a study session around concrete goals with a defined beginning and end. Before You Go On is an opportunity to test one’s comprehension of the preceding material, or for instructors to test that comprehension, before moving on to a new section.

Vocabulary Aids
Among the greatest hurdles to studying human anatomy are its massive vocabulary and many students’ unfamiliarity with biological word roots based heavily in Greek and Latin. Even as a graduate teaching assistant, I developed the habit of breaking words down into familiar roots in my lectures, and I have taught a course on biomedical etymology for many years. I am convinced that students find such terms as ptergoid and extensor carpi radialis brevis less forbidding, and easier to pronounce, spell, and remember, if they cultivate the habit of looking for familiar roots and affixes. I have brought my etymological habit to Human Anatomy. Chapter 1 has a section, unique among human anatomy textbooks at this level, titled "The Language of Anatomy." It aims to instill the habit of breaking words down into familiar roots, intuiting the meaning of new terms from a familiarity with frequently used roots, and perceiving the relationship between singular and plural forms such as corpus, corpora. It explains the historic rationale for a medical language based in Greek and Latin, and the importance of precision and spelling in not confusing similar words such as malleus and malleolus, or ileum and ilium.

Following up on this, every chapter has footnotes identifying the roots and origins of new vocabulary terms, and easily understood "pro-NUN-see-AY-shun" guides for terms whose pronunciation is not intuitively obvious. The most frequently used roots, prefixes, and suffixes are listed with their meanings and biomedical examples inside the back cover of the book.

Terminology
The vocabulary in this book follows the Terminologia Anatomica, which has been the global standard for anatomical terms since 1998. My adherence to the TA is not absolute, however; I retain some traditional terms where TA would seem more confusing than helpful to the beginning student. Following the recommendations of the AMA Manual of Style and Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, I also minimize the use of eponyms and substitute descriptive names, such as tactile disc for Merkel disc and intestinal crypts for crypts of Lieberkühn. I give the traditional eponyms in parentheses when first introducing the term.Some eponyms remain unavoidable (Golgi complex and the Broca area, for example). Also following the AMA’s and Stedman’s recommendations, when I do use eponyms, I use nonpossessive forms—thus, Cushing syndrome and Alzheimer disease rather than Cushing’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.

Concept Reviews
Each chapter has a Review of Key Concepts at the end, a concise restatement of the chapter’s main points for the purpose of study and review. Key vocabulary terms are italicized to make them stand out in this review activity.

Self-Testing Exercises
There are multiple types of self-testing questions in each chapter. At the end of the chapter are 10 multiple choice and 10 sentence completion questions on simple recall of information (Testing Your Recall); 10 True or False questions that call for more than just identifying (or guessing) which statements are true or false, but also for briefly explaining why the false statements are untrue; and 5 essay questions (Testing Your Comprehension) that call for deeper interpretive thought or application of the chapter’s information to new clinical scenarios.

Within the body of each chapter there are an average of 17 "Before You Go On" questions and 3 "Think About It" questions. The latter are questions dispersed through the chapter calling for the student to apply what he or she has just read to a new situation, draw comparisons between concepts in different chapters, and so forth.

The questions in each chapter thus draw upon three levels of cognitive skill: (1) simple recall and recognition, as in Testing Your Recall; (2) ability to express concepts in one’s own words, as in Before You Go On; and (3) analytical insight, as in Think About It, Testing Your Comprehension, and the explanation task in the True or False questions.