Week 2

To expand upon my last post; when I edit the medical articles given to me, they have first gone through two medical editors. So, I am not really responsible for the complicated medical terminology. So when I edit, I am basically looking for comma mistakes, punctuation and grammar errors, as well as sentences that are a bit awkward maybe. As for the style, these articles are written by doctors, for doctors. They are written in very clinical, informative ways. When I say I edit for style, I mean that the Medical Journal that these articles are published in have set style consistencies that they follow. I mentioned the % symbol. They also use serial commas, and numbers are not spelled out. These are some of the style consistencies I have gotten used to looking for already, and I've only edited 4 articles. So when I am editing, I am helping to make sure that the articles fit into the journal, and they are all following the same basic formats.

My rhetorical approach for these articles isn't as developed as I would normally make it. Mostly because I'm told frequently that I am writing for doctors. So this means that I need to write these articles with as much information as possible, but not make it too long. I am also frequently using bullet points just to make short, quick sentences filled with nothing but information. So really, my purpose in writing these articles is to inform, but to make it as easy and quick to read as I can. It's tough. So when I am pulling information out of these articles, I myself am learning exactly what I'm trying to inform these doctors. Sometimes, it's on easy quick topics like a new company that is providing services. Other times, it's much harder. The Obama article I wrote was probably the hardest article I have had to write. He made a speech to the AMA and I had to basically take his whole speech and synthesize it into a three paragraph article.

However, on to week 2. This week has been filled with challenges that differ from last week entirely. On a writing note, I am learning how to take criticism, and also learning that even though I write an article, and my supervisor changes it around a lot, it's not because I did a bad job. Everything written around this office that is going out in a communication is looked over by at least one other person. For example, I had written an article on AMA Policy changes. I had written it over the period of a day and had taken all of the information from the actual policies itself. One of my supervisors, Mary, had taken a look at it over the period of another day and has just given it back to me. A lot of the writing is intact, but she's edited my work, changing a few of my sentences around and such. She's also let me know that I need to include some bullets, because the whole article is just too long.

Another practice that I am trying to get used to is juggling a lot of projects at once. Yesterday was the first day that I've really had to manage my projects because I had three things going on at once. My first task of the day was to interview some of my fellow co-workers on various functions that they had attended for the MSD so that I could write a few short blurbs on them. The three I spoke with assured me that they would get back to me. Then, I had to check on the status of my survey project. My survey project was basically writing a survey in a program called SurveyMonkey. This survey was to ask the Medical Society's members whether or not they used a legal document called Letter of Protection. I had sent the document to be looked over by another co-worker. Then I had to work on writing up a biography for the speaker at the Annual Meeting that the MSD will hold in the fall. All of these projects were interchanged throughout the day. I'd begin work on the survey, have to wait, and then switch around to writing the speaker article. Then, the survey would need more work, so I'd switch again. I've begun to make a list of my projects and their current status, because I couldn't keep track of what I was doing. It's helped a lot, and has made me feel a little more organized.

I've also been learning how to cope with waiting. Some of my projects, like the survey, can't be finished in one day. I needed to write out all the questions and answers, like you would in a normal survey. Then I needed to insert "logics" which skip some questions if you answer them a certain way. For example, if you answered no to a question, and the next question was about you answering yes, the logic would skip that survey taker to the question after. But, this had to be tested by myself, and two other people. I had to wait for the survey to be tested by my co-workers, and then I tested it again and wrote up the accompanying e-mail. This e-mail had to be revised by another co-worker, the links for the survey tested, the survey tested again etc. Over a course of three days, I worked on this survey, in addition to all the other projects. I finally sent it out this morning, in a huge mass e-mail, but waiting for my co-workers to finish their parts after I had completed mine is something to get used to.