In 2006 I taught a 10-week workshop on substantive editing at UC Berkeley Extension. One of the things we discussed early on in the workshop was what makes good writing. Things like simplicity, concision, clarity – you can fill in the blanks.

It was almost easier to identify the things that work against good writing.

And so here is a short list of key reader turn-offs and solutions compiled from some masters of good writing:*

1. Too academic, wordy, or abstract

Your text has many repetitive statements, redundancies and obscure points.  Passive voice bogs down the flow and makes for a dry and remote presentation. References and notes are over-used.

Solution: use active voice, stay real and don’t over-qualify everything you write.

 2. Too technical or instructional.

Your colleagues may understand what you are saying, and you may think it shouldn’t take an Einstein to understand you, but the average reader needs your lexicon of terms translated into simple English.  The text feels remote and ignores the fact that there is a reader.

Solution: Incorporate examples to ground what you are saying.

  3. Not original, too vanilla.

It’s already been said better by others. Your text may have some excellent points but you need a new angle. Or the material is flat and needs some lights, camera, action!

Solution: Use a little drama to retain your reader’s interest. Also, less is not necessarily more. Good writing uses anecdotes, examples, and illustrations.

4. Not convincing, unclear or poorly developed.

The text is full of faulty logic or incomplete transitions and explanations.  Or there is subject and verb dysfunction. This leads to confusion about who is doing what to whom and undermines credibility in the veracity of the text.

Solution: if you don’t believe in what you’re writing, neither will your reader. Text needs compelling examples to back up concepts and keep reminding the reader of the main points you are making.

You can avoid these turn-offs by creating an outline. A great place to start is right here.

*3 masters of good writing

Arther Plotnik Elements of Editing

Bill Stott Write to the Point

William Zinsser On Writing Well

Anne Lamott Bird by Bird: some instructions on writing and life 

The title is a song by Travis, a favorite Scottish band, and it precisely captures a certain fin de siècle mood in the UK. And capturing ideas, mood, feeling is what writing is all about, whether the vehicle is a novel, a textbook or a scientific manuscript. What changes the tone and style of the writing is the audience.

Audience is everything.

There is no such thing as audience.

These claims point to two important issues in writing: craft and attitude.

In terms of craft (attention to workmanship, technical detail and order), audience is everything. In terms of attitude, as William Zinsser notes in On Writing Well, there is no audience: relax and say what you want – or need – to say.

Well, OK. But in fact, many writers, perhaps especially medical writers, struggle with the idea of audience. Tom Lang, of Tom Lang Communications, argues that when writing doesn’t work, when a text is hard to read or poorly organized, it’s often because the writer isn’t writing reader-based prose. In other words, the writer isn’t writing with the audience in mind.

How can we write with a clearer idea of the audience in mind? How can we reliably determine the knowledge, opinions, needs, and wants of our target audiences?

We need to be able to imagine the audience, to create a picture of who our readers are, or likely to be, so that we can reach out from the text and connect with them.

We need to analyze the audience, to systematically ask questions that provide us with information that will help us craft our messages – be they grants, manuscripts or trade publications.

These questions are simple:

Who are you reaching out to?

What do they already know?

What do they not know?

What do they want to know?

What do they need to know?

And what, as Howard Becker puts it, does the audience need to know so that they will not misread or find what we say obscure or unintelligible?

In asking such questions, an obvious acronym can help:

• Analysis: Analysis means asking questions and acknowledging that writing, like most other activities, is a form of social practice – of making text – that requires us to engage, reflect and interact with others.
• Understanding: What does your audience already know about the subject? If you don’t know, find out, so you avoid repeating things that are obvious to your audience. If you can, ask sample members of your audience to read an early draft of your document.
• Demographics: Age, gender, ethnicity and education background influence how you present information. Knowing as much as you can about your audience demographics and cultural specifics will help you avoid writing in ways that have the potential to intimidate, patronize or alienate.
• Interest: Why are is your audience reading your document? Alas, probably because they have to. So make it as interesting as you can within the constraints of the document type, organizational style and reporting requirements. Technical reportage doesn’t have to be tedious to read. Really.
• Environment: Where will the document be read? Federal grants are read in a warehouse or hotel room over 2-3 days. It’s a pretty intense process that you, the writer, can make less intense by writing succinct prose in a digestible format that readers can easily scan.
• Needs: What does your audience need to know? Find out by asking questions – yes, reach out again to sample members of your audience and identify gaps in what your audience  knows.
• Customization: Are there specific things the audience might want to know that you can build into your document? Offer nuggets of information to surprise and please your audience. Use sidebars and pull-out quotes as emphatic take-aways.
• Expectations: What does the audience expect to learn from your document? In medical writing, audiences often need to learn information that will help them take some kind of action. So identify the actions you need your audience to take as a consequence of reading your document.

How are you writing to reach your audiences?

Like many professional medical communicators, I found medical writing by accident – a not unusual experience, as chronicled by Cynthia Kryder and Brian Bass in the Accidental Medical Writer. After a career as a trauma nurse, followed by over a decade as a medical sociologist at several universities in the UK and the USA, I found myself ready for a change of direction that would allow me to use a wider range of skills, problem-solve more creatively and, as described by Daniel Pink in his book, Free Agent Nation, earn a living as a solo entrepreneur.

And at the start of a new year many of us feel that we need a change of direction in our work, or crave a new job. For writers, that could mean focusing on a different specialty, like medicine and healthcare. For scientists, or those with a clinical background, that could mean moving into medical communications.

But how to engineer such a change in direction?

Fortunately, there are many  useful resources, new and established, that can help you plan your change and plot your course into a new career as a medical writer.

Start with the American Medical Writers Association. On the home page, click on About Medical Communication for an overview of the kind of work encompassed in medical writing, the environments in which medical writers work and how to break into the field. For instance, you’ll find a collection of articles about exploring a career in medical communications that personalize some of the challenges and discuss the advantages of working as an employee for a medical communications or pharmaceutical company, or as a freelance artisan who makes a living through craftsmanship and knowledge (and is, incidentally, an emerging economic force, according to a report by Intuit).

Emma Hitt’s website provides links to articles – available for a small fee - that specifically target newcomers and career changers. You might also try From Academic to Medical Writer, which targets the Versatile PhD demographic and charts some paths specifically for those who want to move out of academia and into a non-academic setting, but still use their scientific knowledge in their work.

But my new BFF resource is an e-book by Nancy Monson and Linda Peckel called Just What the Doctor Ordered. Nancy and Linda, medical writers and sisters, wrote the book because people kept asking them how they got into medical writing. Although the book is very focused and practical, it also respects the degree of effort involved in shifting career direction and in learning the craft of medical communications.

In 120 or so detailed and well-organized pages, the authors describe clear routes into medical communications and offer practical advice on how to get the job done. Chapters are supplemented with observations from employers in different sectors about what they look for in medical writers, must-have resources and samples of different kinds of writing, and the book even provides a list of potential clients to get the novice started. All of these resources help to reduce the learning curve, which can rise steeply for the 2-5 years it takes to develop proficiency and expertise as a medical communicator.

As Nancy observes, when she began writing in the 1980s, there was little formal training available in medical communications. She learned on the job and became a sought after writer by ‘putting her feet to the fire’ and paying attention to detail – an essential skill for any medical communicator. While there are more opportunities for formal training now (including a Masters program in Biomedical Writing at the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia), what hasn’t changed is the need for medical writers, especially those thinking about a freelance career, to be self-motivated and willing to create their own apprenticeship.

The maps are available to help you plot your course – are you ready to change direction?