Effective writing – some hints and tips

Writing effectively may take a little practice, but there are various proven techniques that can help. The hints and tips presented here will assist you in getting your message across clearly and coherently – whatever you’re writing.

Effective writing is:

‘Making sure that what you want to say is understood clearly by your target audience.’

Writing clearly is a skill. It can seem difficult at first but there are well-proven techniques that, once learned, make the journey from blank page to publication a lot smoother. And it gets easier with practice.

The tips listed below are general principles that apply to writing anything. You’ll benefit from thinking about them and putting them into practice whenever and whatever you’re writing. Guidance on other techniques that help with writing specific types of text – for example, abstracts for submission to a conference, literature reviews, etc. – can also be found in the Haemnet Toolbox.

  1. Be clear about your message

What do you want to tell the reader? Can you put this in a single sentence to focus your mind on what’s important?

  1. Be clear who your audience is

Different audiences have different priorities, and their knowledge and experiences vary. Think about:

  • What do you think they want to know about your project?
  • What difference will it make to their lives or their work?

  1. Use plain English and simple sentences

Keep your writing as simple and as straightforward as possible so that your message and meaning is clear to readers.

  • Inevitably, all health professionals use jargon – but keep it to a minimum and avoid it altogether when writing for patients
  • While you’re writing, imagine you’re talking to someone
  • When you’ve finished a section, read it out loud. This will identify misplaced punctuation and awkward phrases. If you can read it to a colleague and get some feedback, even better – discuss their comments with them to clarify what they mean
  • Management speak is funny (not in a good way) and full of clichés – avoid it

The Plain English Campaign has many examples of bad writing. Here’s an extract from a letter to a patient from an NHS Trust:

Ward Philosophy: To improve the quality of life in a caring, safe and secure environment with self-care encouraged and, although involving an element of risk, with as little disruption to the patient’s own daily routine as possible. To achieve this goal a good nurse/patient relationship is encouraged with individualised care plans enabling staff to highlight specific problems and needs.

In other words: ‘Don’t worry, our nurses are friendly and helpful.’

You can find good examples of translating complicated scientific text into plain English in:

  • The Cochrane systematic reviews – each has a scientific abstract and a plain language summary
  • NICE guidance – every piece of guidance has a version written specifically for the public

  1. Plan ahead

Be clear in your mind what you want to write before you start. This means:

  • Defining your message
  • Giving yourself enough time to write in a relaxed way (without a deadline looming over you)
  • Doing enough research and reading so that you know the subject area …
  • … but not so much that you don’t know which way to turn
  • Reading the reference material that’s relevant and put the rest aside

Once you start writing:

  • stick with your plan –keep going until you finish what you have planned to write
  • don’t get distracted by new information you come across (there’s plenty of time to think about that in the next step)
  • don’t stop to re-read and rewrite the first paragraphs until you have got to the end.

  1. Write, edit and rewrite

What marks out a professional writer is their ability to write text of acceptable quality to a deadline. Because they have experience of writing techniques, they can get close to the finished piece with their first efforts, so they don’t need to do extensive correcting and rewrites. But they certainly do correct and rewrite – a first draft is a major step forward, but it can always be improved on.

You become over-familiar with your work when you’ve spent time writing, so put the first draft aside for a day or so to clear your mind before you start editing. Then look for:

  • Readability – the simplest words and simplest sentences
  • Spelling mistakes and poor grammar
  • Repeated words, sentences and ideas
  • A smooth and logical flow from one concept to the next (a beginning, middle and end, in that order)
  • Contradictory or inconsistent statements
  • Anything that can be cut because it distracts from your message
  • Gaps that need new information

Read your draft aloud again and, if you can, get more feedback from a colleague. Did you get your message across?

  1. Write what you’re asked to write

Stick to the subject, stick to the word count and structure your work in the way the publisher specifies in the guidelines for contributors.

  1. There’s good and there’s perfect

Professional writers may have the luxury of pursuing perfection in their writing. For health professionals, effective writing may be an art, but it is not “art”. It is about communicating clearly –straightforward, plain and direct. There will come a time when extra effort achieves little meaningful change. Look out for it, and then stop.

Your work will be reviewed by peers and editors –rarely is it left untouched. Make the changes they suggest, unless they’ve made a factual error. If it looks like they have misunderstood what you’ve written, perhaps it wasn’t as clear as you thought.

  1. Writer’s block

It’s not actually a block, more a hesitancy about starting, which can happen for a number of reasons. For example:

  • Not being sure what your message is
  • Having too much evidence and information pulling you in different directions
  • Not being clear who you’re writing for
  • Being overly critical about your writing skills
  • Being anxious about performance and achieving
  • Having too many distractions.

Good preparation, planning and a degree of self-confidence will usually get you started and keep you going. If progress suddenly slows, one of two strategies should work:

  • Suspend critical judgement and write what comes into your head, regardless of quality. Get some words on the paper/screen and sort them out later.
  • If you’re stuck on one section, leave it and start on a different one that you’re more interested in.

Some people work best alone, others collaboratively. If one route isn’t working for you, it might help to try the other one.

You can organise some writing tasks to avoid blockages. In the case of scientific papers, for example, write them in this order:

  1. Methods–least amount of creative thinking involved; you can copy most of it from the protocol
  2. Results–lots to think about but nothing to invent
  3. Discussion–you’re interested in interpreting the results, which you now know well
  4. Introduction – by this stage, you will know what you need to build up to
  5. Abstract – it is much easier to write when you know what’s in the paper.

Summary

We write so that people can learn about what we’ve done. We want to tell them, and they want to hear – it’s rewarding for everyone. Like most things worth doing, effective writing takes practice and a bit of application. But it’s not rocket science (or Art). Having confidence in what you write is perhaps the single biggest step to take. If there’s one thing that makes a good writer, it’s writing.

Further reading

This text has been adapted from Timbs O. Tips to help you write effectively. J Haem Pract 2014;1:43-4. You can download the article here.