Be Organised (Tips for Improving Your Medical Writing Part 3)

The third installment of bite-sized advice to help with your medical writing will concentrate on being organised in how you approach a writing task.

When you are asked to complete a medical writing task it may appear daunting to begin with, but in the words of William Faulkner who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949, "The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."

In medical writing terms this means that your first steps towards achieving your goal must be to organise and plan your content.

Begin by capturing key points

Capturing key points and ideas can be achieved in a number of different ways including mind mapping, brain storming, concept maps and generating a random list.

Rearrange key points

Key points that are noted are then arranged into an organised list, rearranged, restructured and edited to create the skeleton of an outline or a framework.

Populate the outline

Within the outline or framework you present complete sentences, phrases or words together with supporting references.

To help develop the framework or outline

• Use headings and sub headings
• Often the first headings will include Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion as the initial structure. This structure is referred to as an IMRaD structure
• It is important at this stage to group related themes together and by doing this other headings may become apparent

The framework can then be developed further into a first draft by continuing to populate with more detailed content under each heading.

As Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail."

Be Concise (Tips for Improving your Medical Writing Part 2).

Happy New Year.

To start 2015 I have prepared a new blog post with some more bite-sized advice to help improve your medical writing.

Be concise

What exactly do I mean when I say be concise? Putting it very simply:

• avoid things you don’t mean

• avoid more complexity than you need

CS Lewis summed this up nicely “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite”

Avoid excess! Try to use as few words as possible and delete any words that are superfluous. Some examples are:

It would appear that…… becomes Apparently
In light of the fact that… becomes Because
It is this that… becomes This
It is often the case that… becomes Often

As a medical writer your job is not to inflate poor ideas or information, nor obscure weaknesses in the data you are presenting. By ensuring that your writing is clear and succinct you are not producing big words and complex nonsense to be used as camouflage to hide the data behind.

Remember:

As a medical writer you are communicating complex ideas to different audiences.....the language is not there to impress and confuse your reader.