Finding writing advice and learning resources
Writing advice and learning material are available online, some of it free, from grammar guides and writing blogs to articles on writing a scientific paper, and advice written for general writing may not fit medical writing.
Grammar guides
Capital Community College's Guide to Grammar and Writing is a free resource that one editor calls invaluable, especially its page on parallel form. The same site also offers help with sentence diagramming, and in 2011 AMWA offered a workshop on the skill, "Sentence Diagramming for Clarity and Practicality". For basic grammar queries, a writer can check sites such as Grammar Girl.
Writing blogs
In 2017, a web search for "write better" returned lists of tips, some reasonable and some rather awkward, and several of them shared one piece of advice: read as much as possible to become a better writer. Blogs written by writers for writers to improve writing or related skills are another source of such advice. A medical writer's 2017 selection of these blogs included the following:
- Write Better, the blog of LousyWriter.com, an online resource for writing skills and plain English, covers writing of all types, from business writing to speech writing, not only scientific or medical writing, with entries on plain English and clarity and on punctuation, grammar, style and readability.
- Clear Writing with Mr Clarity bases its entries on real-world examples of clear and unclear writing, and each entry ends with a take-home message that summarises what the example teaches. It had not been updated for a while, but the compiler of the selection still called it a wonderful resource.
- Daily Writing Tips is written by a team of writers and editors whose backgrounds range from writing for new media and fiction to scientific writing. It is updated daily with entries on grammar, punctuation, spelling and vocabulary, and can be browsed by category or searched by keyword.
- Grammarly, an online proofreading tool, runs a very broad-ranging blog with advice on grammar and spelling and entries on language, vocabulary, general writing tips and trends in writing.
- Publication Coach is the blog of a writing coach who offers coaching, training and workshops. It is full of helpful tips, not only for medical writers, and several entries deal with approaching writing projects so as to avoid stress and be effective as a writer.
- Health Writer Hub was created by a freelance health writer who in 2017 was President of the Australasian Medical Writers Association. It began as a blog on health writing and grew into a resource that offers courses and online training, and its regularly updated blog gives general writing advice and software suggestions, with a series of four entries on different types of clinical evidence. The compiler highly recommended it to medical writers.
- Apostrophe Abuse presents examples of misused apostrophes from around the world, and readers can submit a photo of one they find. It is not primarily designed to help a writer write better.
The compiler of the 2017 selection disagreed with some of the tips on Daily Writing Tips, held that they probably apply to fields other than medical writing, and held that the same is true of all blogs on general writing. So she advised writers always to take some time to reflect on the advice they read.
Writing a scientific paper
The English Communication for Scientists section of the Nature website has an article on writing scientific papers that a 2018 language column called great. Richard Threlfall's series of articles on the ChemistryViews website takes a writer through each section of a paper with practical tips on improving it, and a free webinar, How to Write High-impact Research Papers, accompanies it.