Enabling people with disabilities: Creating accessible electronic documents - Volume 31, Issue

Rather than equating disability with personal identity, we can better understand disability as the consequence of disabling environments. This alternative view suggests that changing the environment can enable people with sensory, motor, and…

Regulatory Matters - Volume 32, Issue

Section Editors: Zuo Yen Lee, Clare Chang I did it so you don’t have to: Lessons learned as a young writer struggling with a regulatory document Author: Tiago Silva Medical writing is not easy, especially for new writers still learning the ropes.…

Freelancing - Volume 33, Issue

Section Editor: Adriana Rocha Navigating my freelance journey while driving EMWA freelance activities Author: Laura A. Kehoe I didn’t plan to become a medical writer, but then again who does? It wasn’t, at the time, a career on the list of things…

Out On Our Own - Volume 23, Issue

Medical Gems - Volume 25, Issue

Every discipline employs its own secretive words – jargon that allows initiates to communicate with one another in a way that excludes others. The world of medicine is no exception. The idioms used by doctors and surgeons range from the humorous to…

The Webscout - Volume 24, Issue

The word ‘plain’ in its original sense just meant ‘flat, smooth’. In the thirteenth century, it also gained the meaning ‘evident’. And from the fourteenth century on, ‘plain’ has been used in the way we understand it in the term ‘plain language’: to…

Translation: A transcultural activity - Volume 29, Issue

Effective communication is the goal of any professional medical and communication writer. Transferring the correct messages from one language to another is a task that is increasingly covered by software, but translation machines cannot confer the…

Good medical writing saves lives – and even a little comma can make a difference - Volume 26, Issue

Hello, I am a comma, and I dedicate this essay to the medical writer who gave my life a new meaning and direction. He might even have saved me. I was in quite a depressed state because people did not seem to care about me anymore. Then this guy came…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 31, Issue

The indefinite article a functions as a determiner before a singular count noun, either tangible (a human) or abstract (a trait). This determiner indicates that the noun is either being mentioned for the first time or is general (indefinite) in meani…

Medical writing around the world - Volume 22, Issue

As many of you are already familiar, Medical Writing began as The Write Stuff, a publication written by and for EMWA members. One of the goals in making the transition to Medical Writing was that it would become an international journal with readers…