In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

Like birds and trees, abbreviations are often seen in the wild and seldom remarked on. But, like slime molds and toads, abbreviations come in more kinds than most people realize and, while some people find them repellant, others can be quite passionate about them.

If you work with medical text, you’re familiar with how authors like to salt their text with SLTs (Simple Lexical Tools) representing SLTs (Standard Learned Terms). Sometimes, however, these are SLT (Single, Limited, or Transient) in use, and much of the time their real function is just as SLTs (Shiny Little Toys).

It’s important to get a PLS right. When done well, these summaries can improve health literacy in the general public and encourage the pharmaceutical companies that sponsor clinical research to operate more transparently. These eight hacks, adapted from tips by the Plain Language Association International and The Center for Plain Language, will help you master your next PLS.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shined a spotlight on the World Health Organization (WHO), an intergovernmental organization that works worldwide to promote health, keep the world safe, and serve the vulnerable. As part of their work, WHO publishes a range of documents, from international health standards, to “situation reports” describing progress in fighting a disease, to advice for the public on staying safe and healthy.

Drug manufacturing is a capitalist business. We know this because, pretty much without exception, drug manufacturers handle their brand names in ALL CAPITALS: “The gold standard in maintenance treatment for reticulated spline is KYDATID® (roftlomulast).” But does that mean you have to handle it that way too?

The names that we give to drugs share some important features: they’re long, difficult to spell, not recognized by spell checkers, and kind of weird. So if you work in medical writing or editing, how can you handle them without melting your brain?

As a medical writer, your team depends on you to catch errors, large and small. It’s your job to make sure that months or even years of hard work on a regulatory submission, grant application, or research article aren’t undermined by small imperfections that make a bad impression and weaken your team’s credibility.

Bad writing – stiff, convoluted, inconsistent – can get in the way of communication just as bad handwriting can. Healthcare professionals take in a lot of information and must make important decisions based on it. Anything that increases the effort of taking in that information increases the likelihood of errors.

If you have a cat or a dog, you know the first challenge in using medication to treat their health conditions is getting them to swallow the darn stuff. The same is true for health information with people, especially ordinary people with no special medical background. In order to be in control of your health, you have to be well informed about it. But people need that information in a form they can swallow.

PerfectIt Cloud brings all of PerfectIt’s checking to Mac and iPad users for the first time. Users will have the same experience using PerfectIt Cloud on any Office 365 device, whether working on Mac, PC, iPad or Word Online. It integrates directly into Microsoft Word via the Office Store.