Out on Our Own - Volume 25, Issue

In this edition of OOOO, we are pleased to bring to you four diverse and thought provoking articles, and some practical tips. We thank you for your contributions and once again invite you to submit any articles that you wish to share with your…

Adverse event reporting: A brief overview of MedDRA - Volume 23, Issue

Since its inception 20 years ago, the Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) has become the lingua franca of safety reporting in a regulatory context. The standardised reporting across different regulatory regions and languages is a…

English Grammar and Style: Points of view - Volume 23, Issue

Some more four-letter words I published a series of articles in The Write Stuff on short words frequently used in the medical and scientific context between Volume 16(3) 2007 and Volume 18(4) 2009. Since then, at training courses and in email…

Teaching Medical Writing - Volume 27, Issue

Since 2014, I have offered a four-day course on academic writing for qualitative health researchers at the University of Southern Denmark. I tell the participants, mostly PhD students with backgrounds in the health professions, that “learning to…

Pharmacovigilance - Volume 31, Issue

The Regulatory Expert Seminar session at the 2021 Spring EMWA Conference took us on an amazing journey through marketing authorisation applications from a regulator’s and medical writer’s perspective. One of the presentations focussed on the…

The Crofter: Sustainable Communications - Volume 31, Issue

Greeting from the croft! During my non-linear career path, there has been one recurring theme that always rang true: “Context matters”. As a physical therapist working in a rehabilitation centre, understanding my clients’ social roles, home…

Speaking your patients’ language – Is it really worth it? The impact of translation on multilingual patient education materials - Volume 33, Issue

This article discusses the role of translation and its impact on the success of patient education materials, particularly in the context of patient recruitment and retention for clinical trials. We examine how translation and localisation help…

Connecting the dots across the writing continuum - Volume 32, Issue

A medical writer has a unique opportunity to be involved with documents across the various stages of a product’s lifecycle. At the start of their careers, writers typically specialise in documents that are created in a particular phase of drug…

Good Writing Practice - Volume 30, Issue

Grammatical misagreement in tense

I – Present, present perfect

Introduction

Each of the sections of a journal article contains anticipated conceptual components, which can be expressed by a specific verb tense for the perspective of time and the d…

Preclinical research in drug development - Volume 26, Issue

The process of developing a novel drug is time consuming and costly. To increase the chances of successfully completing a clinical trial leading to the approval of a new drug, the choice of appropriate preclinical models is of utmost importance.…