Write effectively: A quick course for busy health workers

  • T. Albert
UK: Radcliffe price £21.95; pp 148 ISBN 9781846191350 | ISBN: 978-1-8461-9135-0

The art of effective writing, as Tim Albert points out many times in this extremely readable book about effective writing, is achieving the objective of getting your message across to the people you hope will read it - your target audience. In other words writing effectively isn't just about being read but also about being understood.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part consists of ten basic chapters with exercises for the readers to complete. The second part, titled 'After-sales service', takes another look at the areas most people may still find difficult with suggested remedies for any areas still causing them problems. Part 3 is a quick summary of the importance of the actual layout used and Part 4 (titled 'For the very keen') looks at common clichés, words often misspelled, grammatical terms, punctuation and similar topics. There is an index.

Tim Albert is not afraid to challenge many of the 'sacred cows' that lurk for anyone writing in the healthcare world. For example the use of the 'false feedback loop', where a piece of writing is checked and amended by various other people who are not part of the target audience and who thus make alterations that are inappropriate (usually for political or personal reasons), weakening the message and in some cases making the writing virtually unreadable. While he covers the subjects you would expect (such as the importance of having a deadline) he also looks at other areas (such as not knowing when to stop researching and start writing).

The layout of the book is attractive, consisting of plenty of variety as well as clear paragraphs, discussion points and tasks in separate boxes and short chapters that look achievable. There are just over 140 pages.

Summing up, I would have no hesitation in stating that the book achieves its own objective of providing a fairly comprehensive course on writing for healthcare workers, clearly providing principles of writing that apply to most forms of writing (from the scientific paper to a simple report or patient leaflet). For me the most important page in the book is page 53 which covers the question of whether the structure of the writing is appropriate - so essential for effective writing. And the last word in the book, the epilogue, is typical Tim Albert when he quotes himself in the phrase 'I hate writing. Having written is great.