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…

Landscaping the terminology of accessible language document types - Volume 31, Issue

There are three main types of accessible language documents that medical writers and medical publications professionals may work on. These are regulatory lay summaries, publication-associated plain language summaries (PLS), and standalone plain…

Medical journalism in a new era - Volume 30, Issue

We are living at a time when the general public is increasingly interested in scientific and medical advances. Medical journalism is therefore becoming more important to medical writers, although it is a subject that few of us are familiar with. To…

President's Message - Volume 24, Issue

Dear EMWA Members, As we came together in the historic city of The Hague in November 2015 for another successful and enjoyable conference, we were particularly delighted to welcome our Benelux members who turned out in force. The usual EMWA…

Pleasing the reader by pleasing the eye—Part 1 The role of format and design in readability - Volume 21, Issue

Whoever writes wants to be read. Yet, even if we succeed in creating an informative, logically structured, and adequately worded text tailored to our target audience, i.e., text we consider to have an adequate level of readability, our documents may…

Home office: Yay or nay? - Volume 31, Issue

In the first quarter of 2022, Bioforum performed an anonymous internal survey among its medical writers to understand if our employees would like to return to a physical office or prefer to stay in the home office despite the lifting of most of the…

What do writers need to know about user testing? - Volume 24, Issue

Increasing amounts of information are being made available to patients – but how do we know if we are getting it right and meeting people's needs? In this article, we describe how we have employed user testing to test and improve not just…

Modern mentorship: Developing medical writing mentor-mentee relationships in the virtual world - Volume 30, Issue

Mentorship is often viewed as a traditional personal relationship model, where the mentor meets face-to-face with a mentee within the same organisation or group.  However, I have been mentoring medical writers success fully for many years using…

Veterinary Medical Writing - Volume 30, Issue

The placebo-by-proxy effect – another argument against homeopathy

Chances are you know about the placebo effect. There are many variables to study,1 but in general, the placebo effect means that if you believe in a positive outcome of a drug, you wi…

Foreword: Writing for Patients, Foreword from the EMA - Volume 29, Issue

In recent years, regulators across the globe have improved the way they communicate to patients and the general public about their activities and how medicines are regulated.