Writing tests are common when interviewing for medical writing positions. Agencies want to find out if you have a good grasp of the English language, a solid scientific base and excellent attention to detail. If you can demonstrate all that, perhaps throw in a dash of creativity to really secure your place at the top of the shortlist.

You’ll typically be given a scientific paper and be briefed to summarize it in some way – in an abstract, or on a slide or slides.

Here are my top ten tips for acing the writing test.

1. Prepare before you write. Highlight important information about the study throughout the source document, which will most likely be a manuscript. Key points include the objective or study aim, the study design, patients, primary endpoint, safety findings, key conclusions. Much of this can be found in the abstract, if you have it.
2.  Don’t be tempted to go into great detail on the background to the study. Your intended audience is likely to already know a bit about the therapy area, even if it’s new to you. One or two sentences should suffice.
3.  Include statistics when you report data in the results section. A p value or 95% confidence intervals are commonly used to indicate statistical significance.
4.  Use abbreviations, but define them the first time you use them. If you’re creating slides, define each abbreviation in a footnote at the bottom of every slide.
5.  Don’t include every detail in your summary. Your brief is not to reproduce the entire contents of the source document so there will be some information that you must omit.
6.  Add visual elements to slides. Inserting icons as bullet points is a great way to break up text-heavy slides. Or use a snip tool to cut out key figures from the source document.
7.  Avoid plagiarizing the article itself. You’ll need to communicate the same messages as those in the paper, but in your own words.
8.  Stick to the instructions provided in the brief. Unfortunately, 501 words is not okay if your word count is 500, and 12 slides is not okay if you’ve been asked to submit 10.
9.  Check for consistency throughout your work. Are you presenting results from a study or a trial? Are you talking about patients or subjects? Have you included efficacy and safety objectives, and reported results for both?
10.  Don’t, under any circumstances, submit an entry with grammatical errors or misspellings.

Here are a few useful articles to boost your chances of success even further:

Understand more about study designs: https://journal.emwa.org/statistics/study-design-made-easy/

Understand the terminology used in clinical trial reporting: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/about-studies/glossary

Write clearly: https://journal.emwa.org/writing-better/removing-the-dead-wood/

Good luck!