Tag: #publichealthwriting

Public Health Writing as Deliberate Practice:  Part 1/3

Developing a deliberate writing practice is a key first step toward becoming a public health writer. Deliberate practice entails focusing on a small part of your routine and intentionally, deliberately trying to improve through daily practice.

For me, this means setting aside 15-30 minutes Monday through Friday to write. I have learned over decades of writing anxiety and frustration that waiting for a block of hours or a full day to devote to a writing project doesn’t work. The time always gets filled and I never get all that I want done. So I end up beating myself up, further depleting my time and energy.

Daily contact with a writing project is critical for me to maintain momentum, to know where I left off and where to pick up. If I only have 15 minutes then I might write or fix a couple of sentences. But I’m there. And, at least for me, showing up makes all the difference. Sometimes I use my writing time to do research or work on things like ensuring my citations are in place and correct. But mostly, I devote the time to reading what I’ve written so far, revising as I read, and building on what’s already there.

The short time period is also critical. No matter how busy I am, I always have 15 minutes. (Thank you Joli Jensen for helping me start small.) Once I made the 15 minutes part of my day, I found that I could easily expand it to 30 on most days. Turning my writing time into a pleasurable routine lured me to the keyboard.

Most days, my excuses for not writing yell at me: Open your email now. Prep for class now. Write that letter of recommendation now. The voice is always loud and eminently reasonable. “After I do X, I will have time to write.” You will be able to focus better. You owe it to your students, colleagues, strangers you’ve never met to respond to their emails now. I used to give in to that voice every day. The problem was that I never finished those other tasks. I never cleared my to-do list. As Jensen says in her book, Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics:

“The point is that things never clear up. They don’t even reliably settle down. Our inbox is always full. Our desks are always crowded. There is always more going on than we want or expect. In spite of this, we can find ways to honor our writing by putting it first and making sure it gets time and attention. Otherwise, everything but our writing will get done.”

So my daily writing practice daily starts with something pleasurable to lure myself in and get me past the voice in my head reminding me about my wretched inbox. Below I describe my weekday writing ritual. I started in 2020. Since then, in 15-30 minute increments, I’ve written a book, started a webpage and blog about public health writing, and am now revising the BUSPH Writing Guide. Bit-by-bit, day-by-day. This is both my writing process and my deliberate practice.

I walk from my house to my favorite café. During the 20-minute walk I try to focus my thoughts on the pleasures of being outside (even/especially in a busy part of the city).

I take a sip or two of my mocha and focus on my breathing for a minute. I find the Headspace animated breathing flowers and purring cats amusing and reassuring. (If you are a student or employee at BU you can join for free. The link will take you to the BU pages where you can access it.)

I read a couple pages of a book about writing, practice, mindfulness, or something that contributes to my writing frame of mind. (I’m reading Still Life: The Myths and Magic of Mindful Living by the Boston writer and yoga teacher, Rebecca Pacheco.)

Then I set the timer on my phone and start writing. And I do my best to stop when my time is up. Somedays, stopping can be just as difficult as starting. I also do my best to focus on the experience in the moment rather than on what I am producing/not producing. My goal is what my favorite writing coach, Rich Furman, calls the “cognitively benign writing session.”

Read Part 2: Stretching Your Attention and Ability: Deliberate Practice 

Read Part 3: How Public Health Students Can Develop a Deliberate Writing Practice

Becoming a Public Health Writer

Writing for a particular audience, to fulfill a specific need, and using clear, concise language that is easy to read and understand. These are the hallmarks of public health writing. Or maybe I should say they are the goals, the things every public health writer should be thinking about and striving for when they sit down at their keyboard. But being a clear, concise writer who engages reader interest while providing necessary information and analysis, is not simply a matter of sitting down and starting to type.

Most of us need to write many drafts, revising as we go, seeking feedback, and then revising again.  This is true for all writing, but public health writers face the particular challenge of translating complex topics, science, and numbers in a way that is clear, concise, and engaging. This is not easy. The source documents we use are often so packed with jargon, abbreviations, and long passive sentences that making sense of them requires specialized training, extraordinary patience, and focus.

I say all of this to comfort rather than scare you away. As you embark on your journey as a public health student, you may find yourself struggling to understand a research article and write about it in a way that makes sense to you and will be useful to your reader. You are not alone. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the challenges we all face in our role as public health communicators into stark focus. The words we use matter as do the nuances and details we choose to include.

The constant critiques of Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are a useful case in point. In the first couple months of 2022, Americans were frustrated with Dr. Wolensky, the CDC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and President Biden for the rapid spread of the omicron variant, for the quick change in isolation guidelines from 10 days to 5, for the shortage of self-testing kits, for the new focus on surgical-quality masks, for what some see as the broken promise that vaccination will end the pandemic.

It’s easy to throw stones at other communicators for falling short, and there are many ways in which official messaging might have been executed more strategically and with a better awareness of the cognitive biases that drive human behavior. The communication coaching Dr. Walensky promised to engage in seems to have helped. You may remember that she shifted her messaging about masks: taking a break when risk is low, setting them aside, but keeping them nearby so we can reach for them again when needed.  She has made her messaging more nuanced than it was in the past. But the balance between nuance and confusion is delicate. No matter how crystalline her messaging, she was in a no-win communication situation. Could she and the federal government have done better? Certainly. Will anyone attain perfect communication about a constantly changing virus in a fraught political context. No.

Most of us will never have a global platform. And we can take some comfort in that relative anonymity. But it doesn’t mean that we can justify lazy or haphazard writing. Covid put all public health professionals and researchers under the microscope. Now more than ever, we all need to approach our writing with a fine balance of confidence and humility. Confidence that we have something useful to contribute. And humble acceptance that we will always be in the process of trying to get it right.

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We’re revamping the Public Health Writing Guide. Watch the Public Health Writing Blog for new sections every week.

Meet Anna-Mariya Kirova, BUSPH Peer Writing Coach

 

 

Anna_Mariya Kirova

When I was nine years old, I immigrated to the United States from Bulgaria, not knowing how to speak English at the time. I felt like I was always trying to prove myself in school, and I had to work harder than my peers because English was not my native language. Getting into college was a big achievement for me, because I felt like one of the primary reasons my family moved to the US was so that I could have the opportunity to pursue higher education, a path that was not common or easily achievable in Bulgaria.

When I first got to undergrad, I realized that my high school classes had not prepared me for the type of writing assignments I had in college. I was placed in an introductory college writing class where I would receive more writing support. I tried to focus on myself and not compare myself to other students who were taking advanced writing classes during their freshman year.

I think starting out more slowly really helped me improve my writing. I was also thankful that my writing professor encouraged us to use the on-campus writing center. I admit, at first, I was reluctant to reach out and ask for help. But, once I committed to making that first appointment, I realized the writing center tutors were one of the most useful resources on campus. Although I ended up majoring in neuroscience, I also took advantage of the variety of classes the liberal arts had to offer. I could find a writing tutor for whatever my writing needs were, no matter whether I needed help with my lab report for biology or my personal ethnography for sociology. My liberal arts undergraduate education exposed me to many writing styles and helped me develop more holistic skills that I could apply across disciplines.

Being able to be concise while also developing a narrative that flows is the key to good writing regardless of the style (creative, academic, autobiographical, etc.). That is what the writing center tutors helped me achieve over time. By my junior year, I was tutoring at the writing center and helping other students build their confidence and skills.

I am a dual degree student at the BU School of Public Health and the School of Social Work. I earned my MSW in May 2021. Now I am pursuing a functional certificate in CAPDIE and a context certificate in Human Rights & Social Justice. I have previous clinical experience which has allowed me to adopt a client-centered, trauma-informed, and strengths-based approach to public health issues. I am excited to combine these two degrees as I work to address health and mental health disparities.

I also bring a student-centered, strengths-based approach to my work as a peer writing coach. I enjoy getting to know the students I work with, and I look forward to learning from them. I see coaching/tutoring as a two-way relationship and a space where two public health professionals can have meaningful discussions. I encourage you to give us a try!

Quote Rarely, Paraphrase Often, Cite Generously (Part 1/2)

Part 1: Quoting the Words of Others in Public Health Writing

Do your best to avoid direct quotations when writing papers in your public health classes. It’s a comment I find myself making again and again on the first round or two of papers submitted by public health graduate students in their first semester. Quotations should be special, I explain. Enclosing someone else’s words in inverted commas draws attention to the exact language they used. You are signaling to your reader that the words and syntax matter as much as the point you are trying to make.

Quote the language of law and policy when you need to explain and analyze it. Quote the language of multi-media campaigns. Use the words of real people (from qualitative research and journalism) when the words themselves offer a window into thoughts, experience, perspective. Quote the words of public figures when you are analyzing their motives, when holding them accountable. On rare occasions, quote a sentence or two from a journal article or book because those exact words sharpen the point you are trying to make in a way that your own words will not.

Quotations should always add value. If they don’t, paraphrase.

All public health writing is essentially an act of translation. The writer is pulling key information on a given topic together to answer a question for a particular audience. Sometimes that reader is a real person, sitting at a desk waiting for our email attachment. She has asked us to gather and synthesize information because she needs it for a proposal, a presentation, a report, or an article. She may be in the process of creating a budget for the coming year and in need of information that will help her decide how to allocate funds for prevention, treatment, or a community program. In other cases, your readers may be a more general audience, looking for information on a topic they want to understand.

In either case, a document that simply strings together large chunks of other people’s words is not useful. Your readers are looking to you to do the work, to transform the information into simple language, to pull together information from multiple sources, and different types of sources so they don’t have to.

When I was an MPH student, I was one of those students who turned in papers filled with quotes. And I was surprised by my professors’ recommendations that I drop the habit. Before deciding to get an MPH, I studied English literature. The words of others, of the authors I was studying, were my data. Start with a quote then analyze the words in front of you and their relationship to other parts of the book and to dialogue, character development, or story arc. For me, paraphrasing often meant providing a gloss of the story’s connective tissue, the historical context it was bringing to life, or its connections to other works by the same author or her peers.

In other words, my thirteen years of previous graduate and undergraduate study (PhD, MA, and BA) had trained me to lean on the words of others. In the MPH program, I had to unlearn all I thought I knew about writing. Becoming more comfortable with and understanding the role of paraphrasing was just one of the many aspects of writing I needed to rethink and practice.

If you are a frustrated student in a similar situation, I hope you will take heart from my story. With practice (usually in response to feedback from professors and colleagues), I did adjust. My writing is now clearer and I feel more in control of what I am saying because I am processing new, complex information more directly and then talking about it in my own voice, for my own purposes. That doesn’t mean I find the process easy. I often struggle to understand the technical jargon and data speak of much of the public health literature I read, so I am always translating for myself first.

If you are a professor who is perplexed by a run of papers laden with quotation marks, consider devoting a few minutes in class to talk about the best uses for quotations in public health writing. And talk about when and how you use quotations in your own writing. When does it work for you? When do you find yourself doing it? What strategies do you have for paraphrasing?

Click here for Part 2: Translating the Words of Others and Crediting Sources

Meet Sarah Thomson, Peer Writing Coach and PH Writing Program Team Leader

Sarah Instagram Photo

My name is Sarah Thomson and I’m a second-year MPH student at BUSPH in the Epidemiology/Biostatistics and Infectious Disease certificates. I’m also working as a peer writing coach and serve as the peer coach team leader for the Public Health Writing Program.

I believe that clear, concise, and powerful writing has a place in every public health discipline. People often ask me how, as a quantitative type, I ended up as a peer coach and the team leader for the writing program. I came to BUSPH primarily to improve my quantitative skills, but hard evidence only makes a difference if our results are communicated clearly to the public.

I have always enjoyed the writing process and I value the power we have as communicators to change behavior and shift public opinion. I wanted to become a peer coach so that I could support others as they strengthen their written communication skills and find their voice through writing. Regardless of your interest area or what drew you to public health, strong writing is essential.

The most rewarding part of this job is the feedback I get from students, and the process of working together to take an idea and develop it into a powerful argument and commentary on the chosen subject. Something clicks when you hear your work read aloud by a peer, and I usually don’t have to tell students that something sounds convoluted because they can hear it as I read their work back to them. Even the most eloquent speakers have trouble translating their spoken statements into written ones. As someone who always reads my own work out loud to myself at my desk, I preach what I practice.

Before becoming a peer coach, I didn’t take advantage of this the Public Health Writing Program or our other writing resources as much I should have. I remember being a student in PH720, struggling to organize my thoughts and being intimidated by graduate school writing. Meanwhile, there was a whole team of students armed with knowledge, experience, and resources in the peer coaching office who could have guided me as I began my public health writing journey.

I encourage everyone, whether it’s your first semester or your last, to take advantage of the Peer Writing Coach Program. Everyone has something to gain from their interactions with our office.

Good news! The Public Health Writing Program has New Webpage and Social Media Campaign

The Public Health Writing Program has truly arrived. We've been working hard to support BUSPH students, faculty, and staff for the last six years.

But today marks the beginning of a new era. We are launching a new webpage and social media campaign.  The days of creative Google searches and a lot of clicking to find all the writing resources we offer here at BUSPH are over. Visit our landing page to learn about the mission and scope of the Public Health Writing Program, writing and library workshops, our Peer Writing Coach Program, library resources and tutorials, resources for faculty and staff, and much more.

We want everyone in our community to write every day, to think of writing as a process and a practice (rather than a product). Follow us on Instagram and Twitter for writing tips, inspiration, information about resources, and constant encouragement to stop procrastinating and sit down to write.

I hope you will join us as we embark on this exciting journey. Think. Teach. Write. For the Health of All.

The Public Health Writing Program Has a Blog!

Welcome to the Public Health Writing Program blog, which I have affectionately titled, Think. Teach. Write. For the Health of All. Watch this space for regular updates on events and resources. This is also the place where I will post weekly musings about writing, language, reading, and more.

Let's build a community conversation about what public health writing is, why it’s important to think of writing as a practice and process (not just a product), how to overcome the many challenges we face when we sit down to write, how to get help, and why it’s important to reach out, share your work, and ask for feedback.