How can I be a good Medical Writer?

Medical writing is the hardest career in the world – probably.

We could be working with any pharmaceutical client on any therapy area, any drug, any diagnostic technique or tool, or any medical device.

And we could be working on content from journal articles and congress materials, to slide decks, videos, training resources, podcasts, strategy documents, and anything in between.

And our audiences can range from patients and their families or caregivers, right through to the top experts in the field or even our clients themselves. That is a lot to get your head around, especially if you’re just starting out.

I’m Eleanor Steele and I’m the MedComms Mentor.

I’ve been in MedComms since 2004, and I’ve boiled down all of that experience into a course on the basics of good medical writing.

In that course, I’ve distilled all of my medical writing knowledge into bite-sized chunks so that you can get your head around all of this stuff in your own time, and it includes lots of practical suggestions about how you can incorporate everything you learn into your own writing process. This is particularly important because we all have different processes.

There isn’t one ‘right way’ to do anything in writing. If we try to follow someone else’s process, it’s going to be an uphill battle.

Now, none of my content will tell you how you ‘have to’ do something. It focuses on the things that we need to consider during content development for good medical writing, and I’ll look at different approaches that we could take for different aspects of writing, but you have to decide what’s right for you and your writing process.

In today’s video, I am taking four things that I cover in my course on the basics of good medical writing, and I’m giving them to you for free. I cover each of them in more detail within the course, which also includes a workbook with reflective questions and activities to help you hone your skills and build your optimal writing process.

But there is a free PDF summary of everything I cover in the video today that you can download from the video description below. So let’s dive into my top microtips on how to be a good Medical Writer.

If we make an alphabet of medical writing terms, A has got to be for accuracy. Everything we write has got to be evidence based and we need to represent that evidence as accurately as possible.

If we have inaccurate information in our content, then it could have serious consequences for patients’ lives, and that is not something that we ever want to risk.

So when we are using references and have a piece of information from that published source that we need to include in a piece of content that we’re writing, we need to be accurate.

But we can’t plagiarise – we can’t take that content word for word.

Firstly, we should never copy and paste from a reference into our own project. It’s so easy to forget that we need to adapt it once it’s in the new document, especially if the formatting updates so that it looks like all the rest of the content.

Just don’t risk it. Ever.

If you need to use the exact words from a source, then it needs to be clear that this is a quotation, so using quotation marks and citing the source.

But this is pretty unusual in scientific writing, though. Instead, we normally need to adapt the content from our source reference so that we avoid plagiarism.

Now this is important for any project, but if we are writing a manuscript for submission to a peer reviewed journal, it’s likely that the journal will run the paper through plagiarism checking software as part of the submission process, and if there’s plagiarised content within it, it will probably be rejected.

OK, so how do we approach adapting content from a source into our own project accurately while also avoiding plagiarism?

We need to think about how we’re interpreting this piece of data based on the audience that we are writing for and exactly what we are trying to get across to them, and the type of content we’re writing as well will be a consideration.

So these factors will often help us understand the level of detail that we need, along with the tone that would be appropriate, and that might be enough to put us on the right track for adapting the content.

Something else to consider is whether we need to summarise or paraphrase the content.

Sometimes we need to take the gist of an entire reference and create a brief summary statement.

Medical writing content is often about complex concepts and data, but that doesn’t mean the writing itself should be complex. Yes, we’re usually writing for healthcare professionals who are bright and well qualified, so maybe they can cope with complexity?

But they’re also really busy and they have to take in and process a huge amount of information every day just to do their jobs well, and we’re often writing for a very international audience.

If somebody is reading or listening to content, and it’s not in their first language, even if they’re incredibly fluent, it adds another level of complexity.

The best medical writing breaks down complexity into simple, brief and digestible components that build up to create the whole picture.

Sometimes writing isn’t even the best way to get the message across.

We need to really consider the format we’re using for the project, and how the audience will interact with that content.

Slide decks represent a huge proportion of medical writing projects and a slide with a lot of words on it, well, your eyes just sort of slide away from it. It’s not an effective way of transmitting information, and also just because text was how information was represented in the reference, doesn’t mean it has to be text in your project.

Remember, a lot of journals have a limit on the number of figures and tables that can be included in a paper. So data may well be described in the text purely because the authors ran out of figures, so had no choice. But when you are drafting a new project, you are not constrained by that.

In fact, a visual presentation of the information may well be the most appropriate thing that you can do – both for the audience, and for the type of content that you’re working on.

Obviously, we do need to include some text to make sure that our audience can follow the thread of what we’re writing about. But thinking about what text is really critical for the audience, obviously, honing it to be brief and accurate, but supporting it with appropriate visual content will make it much easier for the audience to digest and more likely for the project to meet its objective.

In a lot of medical writing, C stands for complexity, but I think we should focus on clarity. Sure, the science might be cutting edge and the data might be convoluted, but when we are writing, we need to make it as clear as possible.

Thinking about writing clearly will help us craft content that will guide our audience through that complexity.

One aspect of this is considering our audience.

What’s their baseline level of understanding? How much detail do they need?

How can we write clearly so that we can guide them through any complexity without confusing them? Also, are there things that we don’t need to explain because they will already know that.

This can be really tricky for Medical Writers, because we are writing for audiences that we are not part of.

They will have a different level of experience from us, a different frame of reference from us. We need to proactively put ourselves into their mindset so that we can write clearly for them rather than just writing from our own perspective.

We also need to choose our words with care, with our audience, and our objective in mind, and there are a few simple rules that it’s a good idea to follow, to make sure that we’re writing clearly.

So things like describing data and comparisons. We need to make sure that we are using specific scientific terms, including actual quantities rather than fluffy words, like ‘more’ or ‘some’ or the ‘majority’ because these terms can be interpreted very differently.

We should also only use the word ‘significant’ when we are describing something that’s been objectively declared clinically or statistically significant, rather than just to denote a big difference.

We can always make sure that our writing is clear as well if we’re using the most simple language that we can, and avoiding clichés, jargon and idiomatic words or phrases.

These kind of terms and phrases can be very specific to locations, and if we’re communicating with an international audience, we are likely to confuse people. And the last thing we want is for someone to get the wrong end of the stick.

Writing clearly will mean our audience is much more likely to understand what we’re trying to say and why we’re saying it, and this is crucial for achieving the objectives that we have for our project.

In my course on the basics of good medical writing, I look at ‘D is for developing’ from two different angles.

Developing a draft, and developing as a writer.

There’s something that underpins both of those types of development though, and that’s understanding your own writing process.

There are as many writing processes as there are writers, and there’s no single correct way to do it. Something that works for your line manager or the person who briefed you might be the opposite of what works for you, and that’s OK.

Understanding how your brain works, how you process information, and how you get from a blank page to a finished piece of content, will help you develop each draft that you work on effectively, but also help you develop your skills with each project.

There are a lot of different things that we have to bear in mind when we’re working on a project, and during the course I give suggestions about how to incorporate these things into different types of writing process.

But it’s important to understand that we can’t think about all of them all at once. It’s impossible – we have to prioritise.

Sometimes that means working in layers and honing something rough into the finished project over time.

Sometimes that means choosing something specific that we want to improve and proactively practising that until it becomes second nature, and then moving on to another aspect of writing craft that we want to improve.

I can’t give you a magic formula for how to be the perfect Medical Writer, but I can help you become the best Medical Writer that you can be.

Some aspects of medical writing will come naturally to you, while others might seem utterly baffling. You might have a real struggle to get your head around them.

We are all different, but the thing that unites us is that if we can identify the aspects of writing that we find easy and the aspects we find challenging, we can create intentional strategies for harnessing our natural strengths, and using all of the tools available to us, we can boost our writing skills in the areas that we find harder.

Identifying what we find challenging is the first step to overcoming that challenge, and during the course, we consider common problems and potential solutions, and there are also opportunities to practice your skills with activities, plus reflective questions for you to consider where you want to focus and what you want to prioritise.

But if something comes up during the course and you are not sure how to adapt it into your own process, or what strategy might be effective to overcome a particular challenge, you can ask a question and I’ll be there to help.