What is a professional writer? Definitions vary depending on perspective. Those employed as professional writers may have a view of their role that is different from someone who employs them or works alongside them. Our goal here is to provide a meaningful description of the professional writer in the life sciences. We encourage those engaged in such work to pause and consider comparisons between how they approach their work and the descriptions we lay out here and equally to consider how they want others within their respective organizations to view the professional writer in the life sciences. As the starting point for this discussion we want to talk about how professional writers working in the sciences are generally defined, or, to say it more accurately, undefined. In going to Wikipedia we find the definition for a science writer is the following:
A science writer is a journalist who specializes in writing about science topics, and thus practices science journalism. Due to this combination, a science journalist needs to be proficient in two areas: as a journalist who can write well enough for magazines and newspapers, and as a scientist, or at least as a dedicated learner capable of following complex science and explaining it in simple terms.As a point of comparison the term technical writer has the following definition:
A technical writer is a professional writer who designs, creates, maintains, and updates technical documentation—including online help, user guides, white papers, design specifications, and other documents. Engineers, scientists, and other professionals may also produce technical writing, often handing their work to a professional technical writer for editing and formatting.Technical writers work any technical subject requiring explanation to a particular audience. A technical writer usually is not a subject matter expert (SME). Companies, governments and other institutions hire technical writers not for their expertise in a particular subject, but for their expertise in gathering information, analyzing the subject and the audience, and producing clear documentation. (See technical writing.)The technical writer's primary responsibility is to gather information and produce documentation tailored to a particular audience. A good technical writer creates documentation that is accurate, complete, and as concise as possible. Technical writers communicate in many ways: printed documentation, Web-based or other electronic documentation, training materials, and industrial film scripts.Searching Wikipedia for the term medical writer finds no definition at all. But the term medical writing yields the following definition:
Medical writing is the activity of writing scientific documentation by someone who is a specialized writer (a medical writer) and is generally not one of the scientists or doctors who performed the research. A medical writer is anyone engaged in communication in the medical or allied professions and sciences. The purpose of medical writing is to have a writing specialist work together with the people who produce the scientific data in order to create documents that effectively and clearly express the messages the data have to tell. The medical writer also serves to make sure that the documents comply with any regulatory, journal or other guidelines in terms of content, format and structure.Medical writing is a well-established function in the pharmaceutical world, due to the fact that people have begun to recognize that not everyone can write a well-structured document that presents information and tells a message clearly and concisely. It is one thing to put a bunch of data onto a page, it is another thing to do it in such a way that someone not familiar with the data can immediately understand the meaning of the data. With an increasing demand for getting new drugs to the market as quickly as possible, writing documents that can be read and understood quickly and easily has become an ever higher priority. Hence, the growth of professional medical writing.The American Medical Writers Association describes a medical writer in the following manner:
Although successful medical writers come from many backgrounds, we share certain attributes:
- Knowledge of medicine or an aptitude for understanding it
- Ability to write (most medical writing does not require us to write like Hemingway, but medical writers must be able to write clearly at a level appropriate to the audience and the project)
- Education: College degree in science, pharmacy, medicine, journalism, or English. Scientific medical writing generally requires a scientific degree (science, pharmacy, medicine).
- Marketing medical writing generally requires a degree in journalism or English
- Deadline orientation
Characteristics of good medical writer include:None of these definitions begins to approach our description of what professional writers do and can do in the task of codifying knowledge into highly usable reports and summary documents. At M/C we see the work of the professional writer in the life sciences as indeed the task of knowledge management.
- Thorough research
- Accuracy
- Logical organization
- Clear thinking and writing
- Readability
In 2004, McCulley/Cuppan consultants Stephen A. Bernhardt, Julie Dyke Ford and Gregory P. Cuppan wrote an article for the American Medical Writers Association "From Medical Writer to Communication Specialist: Expanding Roles and Contributions in Pharmaceutical Organizations." (American Medical Writers Association. June 2004.) This article describes our vision of the expanding roles of the medical writer working the pharmaceutical drug development industry. We revisited this article and extended some discussion points to help advance the argument presented in this piece.
Our vision of the definition of the professional writer working in the life sciences is more aligned with the position taken by Sara Smith in her paper Staking a Claim: Positioning Technical Communication in Knowledge Management. Here Smith makes the case that technical writers are knowledge management practitioners (a concept we heartily endorse and apply to medical writers as well). We find it useful to look at how some other technical writers have attempted to define their work. Corey Wick, in his article “Knowledge Management and Leadership Opportunities for Technical Communicators” (2000), suggests that technical writers operate as knowledge managers whereby they extract and synthesize information from people with specialized knowledge and develop it into well-structured and understandable forms that are then usable by others (readers). Amanda Metz Bemer, in her article Technically Its All Communication: Defining the Field of Technical Communication, suggests that knowledge management is a sub-discipline of technical communication (an interesting position that we want to pursue in future postings). She further argues that technical communication should become the area of the organization that “people turn to when they need their knowledge managed.” This vision, as suggested by Metz Bemer, resonates well with us here at M/C and provides a highlight for how we see the professional writer operating in support of research and development projects in the life science industries. In subsequent installments of this discussion we will provide our arguments for the expansion of the role typically held by professional writers in the life sciences and, in the process, we will provide our working definition for that role.
We look forward to the thoughts and ideas of our readers on this topic as well.
Work Cited
Bemer, Amanda Metz. Technically Its All Communication: Defining the Field of Technical Communication. http://orange.eserver.org/issues/6-2/bemer.html/document_view
Smith, Sara. Staking a Claim: Positioning Technical Communication in Knowledge Management. http://orange.eserver.org/issues/6-2/smith.html/document_view
Wick, Corey. Knowledge Management and Leadership Opportunities for Technical Communicators. Technical Communication. 47.4 (2000): 515-29.
Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog
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