A few days ago, I learned about the existence of TriloTalk-a monthly podcast by Trilogy Writing & Consulting. The podcast focuses on issues and topics that are important to the profession of clinical medical writing.
As a biomedical science PhD student, who has a basic understanding of clinical regulatory documents and wants to break into the medical writing field, I found this podcast very comprehensive, informative and educational. I listened to a few episodes today while taking images of embryos, and these episodes include "Lean Medical Writing," "The Value of Medical Writing," and "Apprenticing Medical Writer." Each episode taught me something that I didn't know before, so my time was well spent getting experiments done and learning new things beneficial to my career.
Out of all the episodes that I listened to today, the discussion in "Lean Medical Writing" gave me a strangely familiar feeling. In this episode, Dr. Julia Frojanic Klapproth and Dr. Barry Drees discussed the concept of lean medical writing, which emphasizes using data to make a compelling argument rather than simply presenting data. The need for lean medical writing lies in the reality that lots of medical writers tend to concentrate on providing every single detail, data point or number while preparing regulatory documents. Consequently, these documents often contain repetitive information, are difficult to read through and increase QC cost. Additionally, excessive presentation of data often means a lack of data interpretation and discussion. One primary reason that this happens is because authors sometimes forget the purpose of writing the documents and who their audiences are. As their names suggest, regulatory documents are meant to be read by regulatory agencies, who have a deep understanding of how clinical trials work and do not read these documents for fun. Regulatory documents need to serve as a guide for regulatory authorities to understand the question that the study aims to to answer and to clearly comprehend that answer.
Although the stage of this discussion was set in medical writing, it reminds me of many principles and guidelines that we commonly use in scientific writing and presentations in academia. "Knowing your audience" is one of the biggest stressing points of giving a scientific presentation due to the complicated nature of scientific concepts and research methodologies. For example, for a scientific community in my field, I would avoid in depth explanations of field specific science terminologies and focus more on the significant results and sometimes trivial observations with appropriate tables, figures and graphs. For a non-scientific community, I would focus at least 50% of my talk on what I study, why people should care about this topic and how it would potentially impact human health. The rest of the talk will be explaining my core findings using the most straightforward and comprehensive language. I would also avoid showing any complex data graphs or tables unless they are fairly easy to interpret.
The same concept also applies to grant and manuscript writing. What we learn in Grant Writing 101 is that grant reviewers are assigned with dozens or sometimes hundreds of applications to go through during study sections, which means reviewers have thousands of pages to read before study sections and many reviewers must peruse applications after normal work hours. Therefore, grant applications must make a strong case for the proposed research using the most concise and precise writing within a page limit. The writing needs to tailor the grant proposal to the three primary reviewers, who are experts in the field, and other reviewers in the room, who are not well versed in the field but still score the application. Manuscript writing is similar because authors can only use a limited number of words and figures to convince reviewers and editors that the research findings are novel, significant, suitable to the journal and supported by the data.
Even though I have not been professionally trained in regulatory medical writing, the content of this podcast episode discusses a very familiar concept that is commonly used in writing in academia as well. I believe having the experience of writing research manuscripts will help with imiplementing the lean medical writing technic.
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