Story, Not Study: 30 Brief Lessons to Inspire Health Researchers as Writers

Many researchers dread writing. They find it laborious - even painful - to put their  scholarly work into words. They get bogged down in the study, and lose track of the story. And they produce uninspiring papers that fail to resonate with readers or reviewers. This book offers an antidote to this problem: brief, accessible lessons that guide researchers to write clear and compelling scientific manuscripts. 

The book is divided into three sections – Story, Craft, and Community. The Story section offers advice on getting the balance of study and story just right, introducing strategies for tackling each section of a scientific manuscript. The Craft section considers the grammatical and rhetorical tools of the trade, showing how they can be wielded for maximum impact. And the Community section  offers suggestions for writing collaboratively, supporting other writers, and navigating peer review.  

Lorelei Lingard is an internationally recognized researcher whose PhD in Rhetoric has made her finely attuned to the importance of language in healthcare and in health research. For 25 years, she has studied the communication practices of clinical teams in order to support evidence-based educational initiatives to improve teamwork. Her work has advanced our understanding of how language influences novice socialization, clinical supervision, team collaboration, collective competence, and patient safety.  An expert qualitative methodologist, Lorelei has used approaches such as constructivist grounded theory, ethnography, case study, and discourse analysis to explore the practices of healthcare teams in a variety of clinical domains. Lorelei is a prolific scholar. She has secured more than 6 million dollars in grant funding over the course of her career and has published >250 peer-reviewed scholarly works. In 2014, she was awarded the prestigious appointment of Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, in recognition of the impact of her work on Canadian healthcare. In 2017, she received the Meridith Marks Mentorship prize in recognition of exemplary mentorship in the Canadian medical education community.  In 2018, Lorelei was awarded the highest international honor in her scientific field, the Karolinska Institutet Prize for Research in Medical Education.

Chris Watling is a neurologist and an accomplished medical education researcher and leader.  He is the Director of the Centre for Education Research and Innovation at Western University’s Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry in London, Canada.  Prior to taking on this role, he was Western’s Associate Dean for Postgraduate Medical Education for nearly a decade, overseeing residency and fellowship traini^100 scholarly works, including empiric research, primers on methodology, perspective pieces, and commentaries.