Sunday 4 January 2015

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.