Write Effectively

A Quick Course for Busy Health Workers

Tim Albert

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781846196492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Many people are surprised by the range of what they have to write: reports, letters, applications, minutes, essays, protocols, policy statements, articles...the list goes on. They also have to face a constant procession of emails, which people tend not to count as 'real writing', but which are every bit as important - and which even the decisive can take two hours or more a day to deal with.At the same time we seem particularly ill-prepared for all this writing. The task is badly defined, time-consuming and difficult.Courses on how to do it are rare. Agreement on 'good writing' seems to be rarer still and the whole process often appears to be more about internal power squabbles than external communication. Not surprisingly, many writers in the health services dislike it and avoid it whenever possible. Others proceed reluctantly, without confidence - and without any satisfaction at the end of each writing task. This book sets out to help you by showing you what writing is all about. It will give you some tools that will enable you to do it with confidence. I would be lying if I said that you will come to enjoy writing (some suffering is inevitable, even desirable), but as you go through this book you should be able to approach each writing task in a more confident manner, and therefore your output should be more effective. More important, you should be able to take control of your writing, and once you have grasped the essentials you will have a powerful tool to help you achieve your goals.

Part 1

The quick course

SESSION 1

How this book can help

FIRST (AND EASY) TASK: Quickly write down a list of the kinds of things you have to write (e.g. reports, letters).

Many people are surprised by the range of what they have to write: reports, letters, applications, minutes, essays, protocols, policy statements, articles … the list goes on. They also have to face a constant procession of emails, which people tend not to count as ‘real writing’, but which are every bit as important – and which even the decisive can take two or more hours a day to deal with.

At the same time, many people seem particularly ill-prepared for all this writing. The task is badly defined, time-consuming and difficult. Courses on how to do it are rare. Agreement on ‘good writing’ seems to be rarer still, and the whole process often appears to be more about internal power squabbles than external communication. Not surprisingly, many writers in the health services dislike writing and avoid it whenever possible. Others proceed reluctantly, without confidence – and without satisfaction.

This book sets out to help you by showing you what writing is all about. It will give you some tools that will enable you to do it with more confidence. I would be lying if I said that you will come to enjoy writing (some suffering is inevitable, even desirable), but as you go through this book you should be able to approach each writing task in a more confident manner, and therefore your output should be more effective. More importantly, you should be able to take control of your writing, and once you have grasped the essentials you will have a powerful tool to help you achieve your goals.

To explain why I think this is worthwhile, I need to go into personal history. I trained and worked as a general and medical journalist, then reinvented myself nearly 20 years ago as a trainer specialising in writing and editing skills for health workers. My first course was on effective writing, and I have since run it some 300 times. Over that time it evolved markedly.

Originally, I intended to concentrate on showing participants the techniques of ‘plain English’, but I soon realised that this was not enough. Once I had shown them how to write simply, their bosses just changed it all back again. It was not long before I realised that their main problem was not writing simply, but writing anything at all.

Thus the main part of this book – the short course that comprises Part 1 – looks at the process of writing in 10 easy sessions. The aim of the first session is to start you reflecting about writing generally, and the next will give you a chance to focus on what your real writing problems are. Session 3 proposes a simple model for measuring whether writing is effective. You should then choose a piece of writing that you have to do (of any length or any subject, but the harder the better), and in the following three sessions you will be shown how to prepare for writing using three distinct planning techniques. In Session 7 you will have the chance to do some writing, and in Session 8 you will learn how to identify when the big things have gone wrong – and what you need to do to sort them out. Session 9 will identify the various micro-editing tasks you need to do on your own work, and in Session 10 you will learn how to harness the comments of other people to improve your writing.

You may wish to work through Part 1 of the book on your own, or organise a group to do it together. There are 33 tasks for you to do. Some will take just a few moments, but others will take longer. You will be developing your own work, so that by the end of the workbook you should not only know how to write effectively, you should have actually done it as well.

My intention is to provide an informal short course rather than a prolonged period of study. You will find brief bits of advice, interspersed with anecdotes and arguments that have enriched the course over the years. Where participants have tended to stop and question, I have inserted discussion points. I have also provided some tables and diagrams that I hope will be useful. I have not included long lists of references or further reading; the purpose is to get you through the 10 sessions as fast as possible – to get you writing rather than reading.

There are three more parts to the book. Part 2 is styled as an after-sales programme, and the intention is that you will look into it several weeks after you have finished the basic 10 steps. This part asks what problems remain (or have emerged), and gives some suggestions for future action. Part 3 deals with an important, but often neglected, part of writing: the contribution of design decisions to the effectiveness of the text.

Part 4 deals in more detail with issues of grammar and style. These are always difficult to write about, primarily because they soon become tedious and turgid for most people. My response has been to provide a series of lists on topics including parts of speech, wasteful words, fashionable clichés and useful quotes. There are also a few exercises for you to do yourself.

If you need encouragement at this stage, let me say that the ideas in this workbook have been tested over many courses, and many people have found them helpful in demystifying the writing process. I am grateful to the participant who called it ‘an innovative, refreshing approach’. I definitely agree with another who wrote, ‘Writing effectively involves a series of steps … These can be taught and learnt like any other skills’ and another who stated, ‘Knowing the principles of writing takes the fear out of writing.’ And for one person, at least, it worked in the way I would have hoped: ‘It has changed the way I write, the way I plan presentations, and my self-confidence about the messages I am trying to convey.’

And finally there was this one: ‘Writing is really fun once you realise it is a big marketing game.’ This should be of comfort as you go through the next nine sessions.

AT THE END OF THE WORKBOOK YOU WILL HAVE

1. ▮ a thorough understanding of the areas you need to work on to make your writing more effective
2. ▮ clear guidelines for measuring the success of what you have written
3. ▮ easy-to-follow principles for meeting the needs of different audiences
4. ▮ simple planning techniques that will reduce writer’s block
5. ▮ an enjoyable writing technique that will save time, reduce boredom and increase creativity
6. ▮ a logical way of approaching the rewriting process, including some objective tests you can use on your draft
7. ▮ a sensible strategy for making the best use of comments from colleagues and bosses.

In other words, you WILL BE ABLE TO WRITE EFFECTIVELY.

SESSION 2

So what’s your real problem?

Over the years, many unhappy writers have turned up on my courses. Some have been sent because of someone else’s verdict that ‘they can’t write’. Others still smart from humiliation inflicted by one party or another, such as teachers who told them they don’t know their grammar or colleagues who said they don’t know their facts, and now hate anything to do with writing. Still others are innocents: faced with a huge writing task – a scientific paper, perhaps, or a major report – they have no idea how to start. A few claim to have no writing problems, but I worry that they are deluding themselves, or lying.

The first thing to do is look more closely at why writers in the health professions seem to have so many problems. How many of their apparent shortcomings are real, and how many imagined? What are the habits that individual writers need to change, and what are requirements of the health service writing culture that they will have to learn to live with? What do they not need to worry about?

Your next task, therefore, is to get a better understanding of what your real writing problems are.

TASK 2: Go through the following s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Prologue
• Part 1: The quick course
• Part 2: After-sales service
• Part 3: Some points on design
• Part 4: Lists for the very keen
• Index