What Skills Do You Need To Be A Medical Writer?
I am preparing a workshop for the medical writing group at one of my McCulley/Cuppan clients. The focus of the workshop is on enhancing writing skills. I know some reading this post and many of the people who will attend this workshop are thinking, “Why do workshops on writing for people who make their living writing?” So I am thinking that I will open each workshop session by posing and then addressing this unspoken question.
My answer will likely wrinkle most brows and even irritate a few, not the primary objective, but perhaps a necessary adverse event to get my point across.
Why have such a workshop? Because most medical writers that I know HAVE NOT been effectively exposed to the skill sets I see as critical to success as a writer charged with creating protocols, reports, and summary documents that describe clinical research.
My point is this—for most of the people I will have in the workshops (largely with life science backgrounds) the training received as “writers” occurred principally during their academic pursuit of a scientific discipline. It largely ended, in any formal sense, with their undergraduate composition classes. However, for some the task of writing is further cultivated through mentoring during postgraduate training. Beyond the academic experience, most of the exposure they receive is just a refinement of the “writing skills” they received in the academic arena. Any training of the type I plan to talk about was likely haphazard at best.
To help back my argument, I did a web search on the term “medical writing skills.” Here is the most common definition I found on the web:
A medical writer must have excellent writing skills, a strong command of English and grammatical rules, attention to detail, good organizational and analytical skills, and an ability to meet deadlines.
This definition is what the American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) and European Medical Writers Association use to describe the skill sets of a medical writer and these attributes are what are commonly listed in job postings for medical writers.
I am suggesting this commonly applied definition is wholly inadequate. It is missing what I consider the first-order skills one needs to succeed today as a medical writer. I’d even say that a strong command of the English language and grammatical rules is not a first-order skill to be a good medical writer—a statement many will call antithetical.
The definition of the term skill is: the ability, coming from one’s knowledge, practice, aptitude, etc., to do something well. If all you bring to the table is writing skills, a strong command of English and grammar, attention to detail, good organizational and analytical skills, and an ability to meet deadlines, then I suggest you will not do well with the task of a medical writer.
Consider what the AMWA website lists as training sessions they offer to make you a good medical writer: workshops on basic editing, writing, communication, and bibliographic skills as well as specialized editorial and publication skills and in-depth consideration of issues in writing.
Or look at what the University of Chicago has as the core curriculum for their Medical Writing Certificate Program:
- Introduction to Medical Editing
- Advanced Medical Editing
- Writing in the Medical Sciences
- The Internal Logic of Medical Articles
- Interpreting and Reporting Biostatistics
- Designing and Editing Tables and Graphs
- Understanding and Mastering the Clinical Study Report
There is little from any of these institutions regarding the skills we see critical for medical writers. Skills like:
- Fostering collaborative writing versus cooperative writing
- Project management of intellectually focused projects
- Conflict resolution during document reviews
- Acting as a document consultant to help devise methods to capture knowledge
- Skills to support the capture, propagation, and sharing of knowledge
- How to leverage the collective wisdom of a drug development team
We argue that to succeed, a medical writer must see their role as a knowledge manager, not a scribe of clinical narratives in various types of documents. To see more of our arguments on this notion of writer as knowledge manager you can check out these other posts on our blog:
The Role of the Professional Writer in the World of Drug and Medical Device Research
The Value of Broadening the Role of the Professional Writer in Life Science Research Organizations
DIA Musings: How Medical Writers View Themselves
Difficulties Assessing the “Value Added” of Professional Communicators Writing in the Life Sciences
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Comments
The University of Minnesota has an excellent Scientific and Technical Communications degree, both undergraduate and graduate programs expressly for this purpose.
http://careerservices.class.umn.edu/students/careerandmajorinfo/wcidwami/SciTechComm.html
Regards,
Laura Church
The comments on this post are really interesting, and the last few begin to touch on something that is important but that hasn’t been addressed head on: writing is a social activity (even when performed alone). That means the rules (at least of English) aren’t nearly as important as the people.
I’m convinced that one of the reasons English skills are so high on the list is because those who value them make some assumptions about English skills and what having them says about the possessor. Specifically, the criterion of English skills can embody a lot of other expectations: The organization and its culture is represented by documents that reflect “strong English skills”, therefore other people who also have strong English skills are like us (they will fit into our organization), see the world as we see it, and use language in the same way to accomplish the same goals. That makes them easy to work with! We won’t have to invest much in community building because the new addition is already a member of a community we recognize (the community of those with strong English skills).
This economic argument is important because we recognize that the documents we produce involve lots of people. Groups working toward a goal is so prevalent in industry that courses in the university (now middle and high school) have incorporated group activities and projects as part of the curriculum. The problem is that few of them actually help participants learn about the dynamics of groups or how to work effectively in a group–how to collaborate rather than just cooperate.
There is an implicit assumption that good skills in English equates to an ability to collaborate in producing English documents. That assumption is like an architect designing a single house that everyone can live in–and assuming that we’re all going to live in it the same way. It is a false assumption. But by buying into that assumption we don’t have to explicitly recognize that people are doing this work, and people work differently.
While collaborating effectively does require effective communication skills–it also requires people skills. What a focus on strong English skills seems to provide us with is a metric that lets us avoid getting into all the messy/touchy-feely people stuff. English becomes the technology that will save us. But like other technologies, it often doesn’t.
What impresses me most about good medical writers is their ability to ask and get answers to questions, to enlist, encourage and motivate others to participate in the creation of communication that meets organizational needs and that gets readers the information they need. They know how to channel conflict constructively rather than letting it progress destructively. They foster collaboration. They facilitate a group ethic that results in quality. They’re also a pleasure to work with.
Thanks for the information, Laura. Are you a student? If so, do you have any recommendations for those just getting started as communicators?
I’d be most certainly interested in attending your workshop, Greg, and know of many other med writers/those wanting to be
who would be as well.