Time to make it shorter: Plain English in our context - Volume 24, Issue

Plain English in medical and scientific writing is not one-size-fits-all, because audiences differ. Advice on writing plain English abounds. In 1946, George Orwell, best known as the author of 1984, formulated a much quoted, compact set of rules for…

Medical Communications - Volume 24, Issue

Dear all, A very warm welcome to the first issue of Medical Writing in 2015! This whole issue is dedicated to a subject very close to my heart (as I'm sure you're all well aware of by now) – plain language. Naturally, everyone benefits from text…

Letter to the Editor - Volume 25, Issue

Dear Editor, EMWA and other organisations (eg, AMWA, ISMPP) support the principles of Good Public at - ion Practice (GPP). As a co-author of the recent GPP3 guideline1 and leader of the professional medical writer section, I was concerned by a…

Regulatory Matters - Volume 30, Issue

Calling all medical writers:

Focus your writing with lean authoring

In today’s medical writing environment, authors are routinely faced with expedited timelines to write documents about highly complex studies with overwhelming amounts of data. Revi…

Lingua Franca and Beyond - Volume 24, Issue

Knowing that the main theme of this issue of Medical Writing is writing for the lay audience, I was thinking hard about what would be the most relevant topic to discuss in the Lingua Franca and Beyond section. My thoughts went to a topic that…

The sun never sets on transparency - Volume 25, Issue

The financial relationships between the pharmaceutical and device industries and healthcare practitioners appear frequently in the spotlight because of their potential to create bias and influence prescribing choices. Public disclosure of these…

Medical Communications - Volume 24, Issue

Dear all, However experienced you are, and whatever ‘level’ medical writer you may be, we all share the same pain… document review processes. Every medical writer has at least one horror story related to review cycles going awry, and the mere…

Medical Devices - Volume 28, Issue

Medical devices should certainly be included on any list of trends in medical writing. That impression was only reinforced by the strong interest in device writing evident at this year’s EMWA spring conference. The three medical device workshops on…

HIV research fraudster handed stiff prison sentence - Volume 24, Issue

In the December 2014 issue of Medical Writing, I reported that disgraced Iowa State University researcher Dong-Pyou Han was facing fraud charges for faking experiments on a new HIV vaccine.1 In spite of a guilty plea, on 1 July 2015 Dr Han was…

Medical Communications - Volume 25, Issue

Most medical writers cut their teeth on manuscripts, and these documents are often mistakenly believed to be ‘easy’ to write. However, the truth is that with all documents, they are easy to write badly but require skill and knowledge to write well.…