Unlock the art of precision and clarity in your medical writing with expert tips

Golden tips for enhancing your medical writing, with examples:





1. Recognize your audience:

  • Think about your target audience (such as patients, healthcare professionals, or the general public).
  • Language and specifics should be appropriate.
  • Example: For patient information brochures, utilize plainer language than the comprehensive medical reports written for healthcare experts.

2. Use simple language

  • Steer clear of technical language.
  • If required, define technical terms.
  • Use "heart attack" in place of "myocardial infarction," and if necessary, explain it.

3. Be succinct and clear:

  • Cut to the chase.
  • Use concise, basic sentences.
  • In this case, "The patient's condition improved after treatment" would be preferred to "Following the course of medical intervention, there was noted improvement in the patient's health status."

4. Be prepared:

  • Distinct headers and subheadings in the structure.
  • For complex data, use tables and illustrations.
  • An illustration would be to divide a study article into sections labeled "Introduction," "Methods," and "Results."

5. Be precise:

  • Make sure the data is current.
  • Be careful when citing sources.
  • Use current research to back up medical claims, and appropriately credit it.

6. Proofread thoroughly.

  • Verify the text for punctuation, grammatical, and spelling issues.
  • Correction: "The patient's" should be "The patient's."
  • Additional Advice


7. Activate your voice:

  • Make your writing clear and interesting.

  • Because active voice is more comprehensible, straightforward, and succinct, the active voice is typically used in medical writing. Additionally, it is simpler to read and comprehend. The passive voice can be employed in specific circumstances, such as when the action itself is being emphasized or when the identity or significance of the action's performer is unknown or insignificant.

  • Following are a few examples of passive-to-active voice:

Passive voice:
    1. The operation was performed by the surgeon.
    2. The investigational medicinal product (IMP) was administered by the nurse.
    3. Chest pain was reported by the patient.

Active voice:

  1. The surgeon performed the operation.
  2. The nurse administered the IMP.
  3. The patient reported chest pain.

8. Be concise by reducing redundancy

  • Avoid overusing the same information.
  • As an illustration, mention a drug's side effects only once rather than several times.
  • Use transitional phrases and words.
  • Streamline the readability and flow.
  • Use "Furthermore" as an example to link concepts in your text.

9. Obtain opinions from others, review



  • Obtain feedback from friends or colleagues.
  • Example: Request the accuracy and clarity of another healthcare professional to assess your research work.

10. Grammar:

  • In writing for the medical field, avoid contractions.
  • Use the active voice rather than the passive.
  • Use the same tenses throughout your writing.
  • Before submitting your work, carefully proofread it.

11. Spelling:

  • To make sure you are spelling all medical phrases correctly, consult a medical dictionary.
  • Watch out for words with similar sounds but different meanings, or homophones.
  • Make use of a spell checker to find any mistakes you might have missed.

12. Formatting:

  • Keep the font and font size the same throughout the entire document.
  • All of your writing should have double spacing.

13. Use of abbreviations and table of abbreviations.

  • To conserve space and keep the reader from being distracted, abbreviations and acronyms are utilized.





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