Saying who the book is for
A book review ends on a recommendation that names the readers the book will serve. Making it means testing the book against the reader it claims, naming readerships by role, by trade and by stage, and at times making the case for a readership the publisher did not aim at.
The closing recommendation and its reservations
In the end, the reviewer should summarise his or her opinion of the book and which readers are likely to find it useful. One review of Prognostic and Predictive Factors in Breast Cancer ends by stating that it will be a valuable addition to libraries, especially at teaching institutions. The publisher may not be overjoyed by that summary, since libraries at teaching institutions are a very small market, and for a book to be successful it must appeal to a larger market, generally of practising clinicians. A review of an atlas of diagnostic oncology concludes, by contrast, that the book's multidisciplinary nature will make it a useful educational tool and reference text for practising physicians and trainees in all fields involving the care of patients with cancer.
Medical Writing 101: A Primer for Health Professionals is addressed to all medical writers, whether beginning students or seasoned veterans, from a variety of professions. One review calls it an interesting how-to book and review course, short but quite comprehensive, and holds that medical writers can benefit from the inspiration of its seasoned and experienced author.
A review of the fourth edition of Medical Writing: A Prescription for Clarity opens by naming the audience the book serves: writers at all stages of their careers and from different fields of medical writing, whether physicians, professional medical writers or students, and particularly those for whom English is an additional language. It judges that the chapters on word order, punctuation, prepositions, tenses and clichés cater more for writers with English as an alternative language, but that native speakers would also benefit, as these aspects are often overlooked in everyday writing.
The same review grades what the book offers by reader. For a non-native speaker the book is a useful introduction to some of the pitfalls of medical English; for a native speaker it will not dramatically change the habits of a lifetime, though the reviewer imagines that ten writers reading it would each take from it a different piece of information that would improve their writing in some small way. It is not a book to read cover to cover in one sitting but a resource to refer back to every so often. It is unlikely to provoke a fundamental change in the way medical documents are written, but it effectively highlights key issues and solutions that all writers should be conscious of. The review recommends it as a necessary addition to any medical writer's bookshelf.
A positive review can state its reservation in the same sentence as its recommendation, as two award reviews do. One says the book is neither for the faint of heart nor for those interested in a more critical history of psychiatry, and nonetheless provides an invaluable and accessible overview of psychiatric care for the lay reader. Earlier, the same review notes what the authors bypass: a string of treatments co-opted for abusive purposes, such as lobotomy, and dodgy diagnostic categories, homosexuality having been removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders only in 1973. Another notes that, although the book's emphasis is on summarising all of the available research, it gives sufficient practical information and illustration to serve as a basic guide to practice.
The reader the book claims
A review can test the publisher's claim about who a book is for against its contents. One review of a guide to writing for peer-reviewed journals finds that the blurb's claim that the book assists anyone concerned about getting published, and uses a wide range of multi-disciplinary examples, could at best be described as somewhat misleading, since the book is clearly aimed at junior researchers and squarely focused on the social sciences, its two authors both working in education and drawing most examples from their own field. Nonetheless, the review finds, it provides some information that will be useful to medical writers. The review separates what serves which reader: there is quite useful material for junior researchers on converting a thesis into journal articles and even on structuring a thesis with articles in mind, the chapter on writing with others is excellent albeit targeted at junior researchers, and for experienced writers and researchers the points of real interest may be limited to a few pages here and there.
The same review also tests the book's claims about itself. Its asserted international approach turns out to be limited to a couple of lines on the writing difficulties of people whose mother tongue has different cultural conventions from English and a passage on how non-native speakers interpret nuanced reviewer comments. Against its asserted accessible style, the reviewer notes that the authors do not use the simplest English imaginable, and that, while the reviewer is grateful for several new words, less patient readers may be less appreciative.
A review can also test whether a book is consistent about what it assumes its reader knows. One review of Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions to statistics and to epidemiology, two books in the series that may be of interest to medical writers, does this for each book. A laboured description of the mean in the statistics volume seems to assume that the reader lacks even basic knowledge of mathematics, yet the book uses probability density without defining it and describes the Bernoulli distribution opaquely, so a reader who needed the mean defining may well struggle with the chapter on probability, as the author himself pretty much acknowledges. The epidemiology volume likewise assumes ignorance on the part of the reader, writing sugar and of the lung instead of glucose and pulmonary, and the reviewer wonders how many of its potential readers do not know what glucose is. The verdict is that both books seem aimed at people with high levels of intelligence or education but little or no knowledge of the subject. They are not entirely successful: the epidemiology book arguably provides the more useful introduction but has the more obvious weaknesses, and both lack a glossary, which can be an invaluable resource for newcomers to a subject.
A review of David Quammen's Ebola: The Natural and Human History of a Deadly Virus judges the book by what it assumes of the reader: the author relies on the reader's scientific acumen to gain a strong grasp of the topics, science and geography, so the book is a fascinating read for those already interested in the subject and a more challenging one for those with little scientific background or previous knowledge of the virus.
Readerships by role, trade and stage
A review can name several audiences at once. One names individuals recently facing a cancer diagnosis, families of patients, and health care providers interested in fine-tuning their bedside manner or delivery. Another names practitioners in law enforcement, public policy, public health, trauma and emergency medicine, psychiatry and chronic care medicine, and then says what in the book will serve them: a series of clinical and forensic photographs of characteristic injuries will be useful to those who need to identify clients who are probable victims of violence, and the book provides sample tools and guidelines including victim danger assessments, questionnaires on previous trauma, forensic medical report forms and state statutes mandating the reporting of domestic violence. A third calls the book excellent and informative for all readers, although expectant parents may want to read with caution and a box of tissues, and names undergraduates interested in a career in genetics or medicine and medical students interested in clinical genetics and paediatrics as the readers for whom it is particularly relevant.
A review can turn an author's stated audience into a recommendation by job title. One review of the third edition of a publication-strategy handbook records the book's design, relevant to readers with differing levels of experience and expertise in managing and writing journal publications and abstracts, whether based in pharmaceutical companies, medical communications agencies or academia. It then calls the book a must-have for writers, editors and account managers in medical communications agencies and in the publications departments of research institutions and of pharmaceutical and medical device companies. The reviewer also recommends it to fellow freelance writers as an easy way to make sure they are on the same page as the companies they work with when it comes to disseminating medical research findings.
The same review says whom the book's second part serves. That part, an A–Z covering around 250 topics in 145 pages, is intended both to expand on specific topics from the first part and to be consulted when a reader has a particular problem or question. The reviewer calls it a fantastic resource for people who have had little or no exposure to the medical publishing industry, and for others, like the reviewer, who worked in the industry some time ago and need to catch up on more recent developments.
The 2011 AMWA Medical Book Awards were organised by audience, in three categories: non-physician health care professionals, physicians, and the public or health care consumers.
The reviewer of the non-physician winner, a pharmacy management textbook, judges it as a new pharmacy manager, and says so. The review names the sections the reviewer found most beneficial, pharmacy operations, covering workflow, medication safety, purchasing and managing inventory, and third-party payment, and human resources, covering employment law and recruitment and hiring. It calls this material invaluable because these topics are inconsistently taught in pharmacists' practice settings, and notes that the emphasis on patient care and drug information in pharmacists' education places significantly less importance on leadership in the workplace. It also places the book against its shelf: most pharmacy management textbooks do not offer the personal development material on time management, professional development and personal finance that this one ends with. At the end it widens the audience: although the intended audience is pharmacy students and practitioners, much of the information may be valuable to anyone interested in leadership or professional development, and the book is a must-have for every pharmacy professional.
The physicians' winner is reviewed by a doctor who had been diabetic for twenty years by medical school, had plenty of experience on the receiving end of the stethoscope, and came to believe during training that when it came to finessing a difficult medical conversation either you had it or you didn't, and who calls the book a paradigm-shifter. The reviewer reads its mnemonics against an emergency medicine practice, notes that they are not scripts, since the author recognises that how the strategies are carried out differs with the situation, and credits the accompanying unscripted role-play recordings and the consistent chapter structure that suits the book to targeted reading as well as to reading cover to cover. The verdict names two audiences at different stages: the book will be as useful to a class of second-year medical students in an introductory clinical skills course as to the experienced clinician who is wise enough to know she can always learn more.
The review of the consumer winner, a nutrition guide for cancer survivors, opens by establishing who counts as the reader. It names a broad readership: cancer survivors, which a side note in the book defines as anyone who has received a cancer diagnosis, completed cancer treatment or lived several years past a diagnosis, and those who will likely experience cancer in their lives as family members or caregivers. It then inventories what the book covers and singles out its aids for the reader: a glossary defining cancer-related terms that may be confusing or unfamiliar, such as adjuvant therapy and apoptosis, per-chapter reference lists, and charts that help the reader decide what to include in a healthy diet and what to avoid. Its closing line places the reader in one sentence: if you don't know Gerson Therapy from Kelley's Treatment, or even if you do, this is the book for you.
Readerships beyond the one the book was written for
A review can address separate readerships in separate paragraphs. One review of a 2,935-page paediatric textbook gives practising clinicians one paragraph, calling it the ultimate one-stop reference for clinicians who provide frontline care to children and adolescents, and medical writers and editors another, saying that it and its companion manual of over 200 calculators, symptom questionnaires, documentation forms, algorithms and patient education materials uniquely advise the medical communicator on current best practice for the youngest patients.
A review written for an association's members can place the book against them. A review of a critical book about the pharmaceutical industry judges that the association's members will probably not learn much that is new from it, but that if any are prompted to give more thought to ensuring the trials they work on are always published, it will have fulfilled a useful function. The review of the guide to writing for peer-reviewed journals observes that its authors' default perspective of writing as scary and horrible will presumably not strike a chord with most members of the association.
A review of a book written for a different readership can state the author's audience and argue for its own at once. One review of the second edition of a statistics text aimed primarily at pharmacy students establishes the author's stated audience, those who have to use statistics but have no ambition to become statisticians, and then argues the case for its own readers rather than assuming it: much medical research involves both drugs and statistics, so medical writers should also find it a helpful introduction or refresher. It says what different readers get from the book: its cleverly designed graphics will help visual learners, who in the reviewer's experience often struggle with books on statistics that present uninterrupted text or off-putting equations, and anybody who needs to use statistical tests, rather than just write or edit material describing them, will find guidance on entering data into common statistical software packages. Its insights into statistical language, such as a section on the meaning of the term risk, should be useful for writers, and its final chapters on multiple testing, survival analysis and questionnaires are likely to be particularly relevant to them.
The review states what the book does not set out to do: give detailed guidance on the use of statistics or the presentation of data in medical publications, for which the reviewer's favourite resource remains Lang and Secic's How to Report Statistics in Medicine. The verdict names the reader once more: although the book is not written for medical writers, the reviewer thinks many would find it useful, and its approach will be especially appreciated by those who always feel they ought to know more about statistics but find other texts impenetrable.
A reviewer can also name a second readership that a book was not written for. One award committee recommends a gastroenterology board-review text intended for medical students, internal medicine interns and practising physicians who would like a practical review of their knowledge, and adds that it is also valuable for medical writers who need background information for writing in those fields. It closes by recommending the book not only for physicians and trainees in need of board review assistance but also for medical writers who may need powerful information for articles, grants or other projects.
A reviewer from outside a book's readership can say so and still name that readership. One award reviewer who writes about human disease, with experience of invertebrates limited primarily to spiders, butterflies, insects and the occasional crustacean, reports reading nearly every page of a textbook of invertebrate medicine to see the similarities between the treatment of human disease and invertebrate disease. The review names as the book's readership veterinarians, zoologists, biologists, aquatic medicine specialists and others working in the fields of animal health and welfare.