Designing the architecture of the argument in development reports

Kirk Livingston, a teacher and a medical writer working largely in the medical device industry, as well as a fellow blogger at LivingstonContent, shared this comment on my previous post regarding poor rhetorical shaping of arguments in research reports.

There’s a lot of work involved with producing solid, well-reasoned conclusions. Can it even be accomplished as an “authoring team” or is it the work of an individual? Recent research about medical device companies in Minnesota suggests communication teams are chronically understaffed. So–who has time to come to the right conclusions? Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I agree there is considerable work that goes into producing solid, well-reasoned conclusions. I am certain the work can indeed be accomplished by an authoring team. The caveat here is, it can be accomplished as long as the team engages in truly collaborative authorship work practices and makes use of pre-writing planning tools to help shape the argument.

I am not so sure that writing teams are chronically understaffed. I think the real issue here is the limits of interest and skill that team members may have towards the task of writing. As I reflect on 17 years of work associated with the authorship of regulatory documentation, I am convinced adding numbers to the equation will have little bearing on the rhetorical qualities of any given document. Larger writing teams will likely yield only emotional comfort--the notion of safety in numbers.

Producing high quality documents is a function of knowing what you want the document to do for you, a sense of where arguments must be played out in a document, and what writing tools to use in order to get true collaboration and sharpen everyone's focus to achieve the objectives you want to document to support.

Producing high quality documents in the forum of pharmaceutical and medical device research requires understanding how to build out the red thread of logic in a research report. In pre-writing planning it starts with something as simple as building a table that is to be filled in by the authoring team. The table has three columns to be completed by the team:

Primary & Secondary Objectives | Conclusions | Key Data

You then have one row in the table for each objective.

The team's task is then is to build out conclusions about achievement of each objective and what data warrants that conclusion.  A simple but powerful writing tool that helps a team to lend considerable shape to the architecture of the argument that must be represented within a report.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog