What Is Good Writing for Healthcare?

 

What is “good” writing?

It doesn’t happen often, but every now and then a client gives us honest feedback on our work that certainly gets our attention: “This isn’t good writing.”

We consider ourselves professional communicators, so this sort of comment on the text (or “content,” in the web vernacular) that our medical writing team generates – mostly for websites, and produced by professional writers with decades of experience – invites a line of questioning: What specifically is not good in this writing sample? What needs improvement?

We go on to ask, are you able to cite a sample passage as the worst offender? Could you perhaps rewrite it yourself to clarify your comment? Can you give us general guidelines for good writing?

The answer is always the same, and it says much about the realities of healthcare communications.

What’s so awful about sixth grade?

In every case thus far, the answer that emerges is something along the lines of, “This is written for the sixth-grade reading level.”

You hear that a lot about communications, the cliche about writing for a grammar-school student. Or perhaps a middle-school student.

Many times after hearing that comment, I’ve asked the commenter to explain what he or she meant. To this date, no one ever has ever elaborated to my satisfaction.

To which the next question becomes: So? Where’s the harm?

In praise of lucidity

Clarity is not an insult. It’s an asset. This is especially true in the 21st century. I’ll provide two compelling pieces of evidence.

The first is about health literacy. In its report “Health Literacy: A Prescription to End Confusion,” the Institute of Medicine reports that ninety million people in the United States, nearly half the population, have difficulty understanding and using health information. As a result, patients often take medicines on erratic schedules, miss follow-up appointments, and do not understand instructions like “take on an empty stomach.”

The second piece of evidence has to do with life in the 21st century. In a report, the Nielsen Company found that Americans watched more television than ever in 2010. Total viewing of broadcast networks and basic cable channels rose about 1 percent for the year, to an average of 34 hours per person per week.

Hemingway versus Fitzgerald

It may be questionable that Americans are actually watching that much television. It seems more likely that they are simply having televisions turned on somewhere in their households that many hours a week … all while they go about cooking dinner, doing the laundry, surfing the internet or multi-tasking themselves into oblivion.

Our job in healthcare communications is about creating expository communications, not narrative prose. Communications is an art, and good writing is a matter of subjective judgment and endless debate. It’s one reason that students in writing programs at both the undergraduate and the graduate level argue endlessly about who was the better scribe: Hemingway or Fitzgerald?

More on that topic in a future blog posting.