And to be honest, you might not need more than this in regulatory medical writing to be a good Medical Writer. At one level, the job entails solving problems creatively, with logic, and questioning what does and doesn't make sense, for example, within a protocol.
But there's another level of analytical skills that could be a game-changer in your career. Why? Because it will make you stand out from other Medical Writers who don't have them.
These are the 3 analytical skills that can be the cherry on top for an already good Medical Writer.
Understanding basic statistical concepts and data interpretation
You probably already have this skill if you have a science background, but if you don't, don't despair. You might have forgotten your statistics courses from high school or were never good with numbers, but you don't need to be a statistician to be a great Medical Writer. You only need to understand the meaning of basic statistical analyses and what do their results say about the data.
Mastering this skill will help you write faster and truthfully. You will be an asset to the team working with you because you'll save them time and may even help them interpret data.
Quickly understanding complex information
To write about a clinical trial, a Medical Writer must understand complex clinical information. To do so, they require logical reasoning and critical thinking.
But unlike research in Academia, medical writing projects have a strict end date, so a Medical Writer cannot take all the time in the world to understand the information on hand. They must quickly realise the logic behind the clinical trial, what and why it's being done, how the results support the conclusions and be able to describe all this objectively.
Visual communication
The skills needed to illustrate a timeline, a schedule of assessments or results of a clinical trial require the ability to extract essential information from a source document and use visual elements so that the resulting figure, graphic or infographic is self-explanatory but without overloading it with footnotes, icons and colour.
This means that you must know WHAT information is essential to present and HOW you should present it, a skill that not all regulatory Medical Writers have because the job mainly consists of writing, not designing.
So if you have the skill to present information visually and, even more, you can use tools such as Canva, not only PowerPoint, to craft your illustrations, you have what it takes to take your visualisations from good to great.
In conclusion
These skills are not essential for getting into regulatory medical writing, but they will make you stand out from the crowd if you have them.
If you don't feel you have some of these essential skills, enrol in our Experiencing Medical Writing course below, where you get trained on writing while you practice understanding basic statistics, logical reasoning and critical thinking.
In this course, you'll also see all the visualisation included in a Clinical Study Report. And to see the latest trends on visual communications in medical writing, check EMWA's Medical Writing Journal issue on Visual communications and start creating your own visualisations on platforms like Canva.
And if you still want to discover what medical writing is about, click on the button below to access the free section of our Discovering Medical Writing course.
Experience Medical Writing now!
Discover Medical Writing!
Yours truly,
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