What Medical Writing Means To Me

Abstract

This is a personal account based on many years experience as a medical writer. It considers aspects of medical writing with particular focus on the intellectual and ethical dilemmas it can raise. What makes medical writing both so interesting and so challenging is the fact that it often takes place at the border between different disciplines. For example, it straddles both science and art. Ethical issues also arise at the boundaries between academia and commerce. Until recently there have been few guidelines to help navigate such potentially dangerous territory. I have been privileged to be involved in developing two such guidelines and I describe how I hope the Good Publication Practice guidelines for pharmaceutical companies and the European Medical Writers Association guidelines may improve the practice of this fascinating profession, Medical Writing.

Content and communication: How can peer review provide helpful feedback about the writing?

“…[ 3 ] Distinguishing between the ability to evaluate the scientific content (i.e., the "selection" "gatekeeping," "screening" or "deciding what gets published" functions of peer review) and the ability to provide effective feedback on the content, writing or language (i.e., the "improving what gets accepted" function of peer review) would help make explicit which skills make peer reviewers useful to editors and authors. This is important because the ability of peer review to perform the "improving" function effectively has been questioned not only by wordface professionals [ 4 ] but by researchers in peer review [ 5 ].…”

“…How can editors test what types of writing and editing make published articles more comprehensible, readable and useful to readers? The only way is to ask a representative sample of real readers to rate characteristics of the text [ 4 , 5 ]. Designing such research would probably require consultation with experts in academic literacy and other specialists in writing and editing.…”