How Document Content and Organizational Aids Help Medical Writers

Continuing on our theme of Medical Writing Superpowers (Efficiency, Compliance, Cooperation, Accuracy, Consistency, Presentation, Voice) and the tools to help you achieve them, I wanted to next highlight document content and organizational aids. 

Outlining (Activate your powers for Cooperation, Consistency, Voice) 

However dry, our regulatory documents tell a story and have a perspective.  

• Utilizing a tool that allows the MW to organize thoughts and information to create an outline is a best practice. 

• The complexity of these tools vary and you can use programs you already have, but it is important to not bottle up or jumble the message that our documents share with the audience.  

• Lay it out, write it down, move it around, and hone the message.  

• Keep the objectives and themes of the document in the forefront with use of a outlining tool. 

Style Guides (Activate your powers for Efficiency, Consistency, Presentation, Voice) 

Style guides often govern our writing and are important to writing clearly and consistently. 

• Paper style guides can be difficult to administer and fully apply to our writing. 

• Electronic style guides are useful tools that allow their users to implement style rules and preferences consistency across many documents 

• Look for a cloud-based engine with a backbone of standard scientific terminology, punctuation rules, and AMA/industry preferences that can be configurable to your client (or in-house) rules. 

• Examples of style guide rules include: program-specific terms, clinical and scientific terms, preferred usage, abbreviations, hyphenated, italicized, and capitalized terms, and punctuation rules. 

Michael Claffey

Chief Operating Officer