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I have long promised to write about how I got started as a medical editing and writing consultant. I wish I could say that it would be as easy (knock on wood) for everyone as it has been for me. However, in retrospect, it was a long journey to this point.
When I was in high school, my father, who is a clinical researcher, started handing me journal articles and book chapters to proofread for him. He knew that I had an eye and an aptitude for it, so he would often ask me to copyedit for any typos or punctuation/grammar errors in his galleys before he returned them for publication. It was during this time that I got a feel for what scientific writing is supposed to look like. My father is very widely published and an excellent writer. It didn't take much effort on my part. It was like solving a puzzle: in my geekiness, I gloried in finding errors that professional editors hadn't caught.
When I was an undergraduate, I worked in my father's asthma research laboratory. I sat in on meetings that planned studies, and I worked as an assistant in conducting studies. Therefore, even as a creative writing major, I got a feel for study design and limitations, methodology and results. I was training for my future career, even though I had no idea or intentions toward it at the time.
I got a Masters Degree in English with the full intention of teaching literature and writing at the university level. However, life doesn't always work out the way we hope, and budgetary cuts made it necessary for me to find other employment. I obtained a position in a research institute at the local medical school. It was there that I got what I jokingly call my Masters in Medical Writing and Editing. One of my largest responsibilities was to support the researchers, so I sat in on countless meetings about research design. My role was to take notes and write reports, but you can't help but absorb knowledge about how to power a study, recruitment, study samples, and methodology when you sit in on that many meetings. I also organized and attended multiple workshops given to medical residents and interns on how to conduct research. I wrote guidelines for them to follow about creating research projects. I consulted books about clinical research design. I don't have a Masters in Public Health, because from what I have seen of the curriculum, I don't need to take those classes for credit. I had a crash course.
By the time I began consulting, I had read so many journal articles and so many grants that I knew their components intimately. They didn't intimidate me, and I knew how to imitate them. When I receive a manuscript from a client, I view it as a piece of marble that is supposed to look like a dog after I have chiseled it: I whittle away at or add to the manuscript until it looks like a dog. I have a platonic image in my head of what a perfect manuscript or grant application should look like, so I attack the piece before me until it matches the ideal in my head.
People often ask me what my background is. I tell them that I have an MA in English and that I taught technical/grant writing at the university, and that is true. But what is harder to explain is the on-the-job training I had for two years that really cemented my assets as a medical editing and writing consultant. I can look at a study and identify problems with it and make recommendations for how to change it-- or when the project needs to be either abandoned or revised into an essay rather than a straight reporting of study results. I know when a Discussion section is weak, and how to fix it. What I offer my clients is substantially more than a geeky knowledge of perfect punctuation and grammar usage (and my knowledge there is not perfect: I still have to look things up, but at least I know when I don't know the answer, and how to find it).
