Five tips on how to write for BMJ SPC Forum – BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care

By Professor Mark Taubert, BMJ SPC Journal Editor & Forum Curator Twitter

Introduction

Thinking of writing an article for our highly accessed BMJ SPC Forum series?

Then please read on.

forum (noun) · forums (plural noun) · fora (plural noun)

a meeting or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged:

“we hope these pages act as a forum for debate”
- a website or web page where users can post comments about a particular issue or topic and reply to other users’ postings.
(in an ancient Roman city) a public square or marketplace used for judicial and other business.

*Prof Taubert: tips on successful medical writing*

Five Tips on how to write a great blog, opinion or forum piece

Here are some basics, if you want to write an article to get people interested about some work you have done, or send them to a longer paper you have submitted. Or perhaps you want to drive people to another team’s work, and use your own style and enthusiasm to convince everyone why it is worth their time to dive deeper into this topic area. Feel free to suggest more in the comment box below.

Plain English, please. This is your chance to present the topic to a wider audience, including people who are just starting out learning about it. Microsoft Word has a feature that let’s you check your article for its readability and reading age, which you may find interesting. Don’t use long sentences. Keep them short. And if you have a long sentence that can be split into two, do it.
Hook the readership into wanting to read more (and provide embedded hyperlinks to your longer article). Start with a controversial remark. See what I did at the start of this blog? You can use a provocative statement to get readers hot under the collar to read more, or you can use a story or anecdote. Perhaps there’s a controversy surrounding your medical topic of choice, and you can tap into people’s concerns, whilst also presenting some potential solutions
Keep it simple. Don’t cover too much ground, just focus on one topic. You can always write another forum piece, on another day about the other topic(s) that are associated with the area you are writing about
Know your target audience. Who are you writing for? If it is a piece on the controversies of assisted hydration in the last days of life, is your article aimed at healthcare professionals who grapple with the decisions on harm versus benefit of starting or stopping fluids
Put something personal and human into your blog! Research articles can be long and impersonal, whereas blogs can show a photo of your team. It can help people connect to you, and might even prompt more people to get in touch, compared to the full length pay-wall protected article. We particularly liked the photo submitted by Dr Arjun Kingdon for his blog on assisted hydration (see below). But do please make sure you send your photo in rotated correctly, not like this customer, for instance, who is performing an unintentional 90 degree head-tilt.

Some other forum article examples from our series can be found below. Please keep articles under 1000 words, ideally around 500, and also provide author details, name, institutions, emails (optional) and social media profile links at the start of the article.

Lots of articles and medical topics may require an easily accessible ‘gate-way’ blog, so do get in touch with info.spcare@bmj.com if you are interested.