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


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog