Interlude: Beginnings, Growing Talent, and Health Literacy

Today, I'm heading to my hometown to visit my dad, who still lives in the same house I grew up in. Whenever I visit, I am reminded of my beginnings, and I think a lot about where I came from.

I grew up in a very small, rural town. And my family got by on what my mom liked to call "modest circumstances." She was being euphemistic.

Most people in my hometown had financial challenges and were not well-educated. I was actually the first person in my family—and born and raised in my hometown—to go to college and get a degree, let alone a PhD in a STEM field.

I'm not sharing this story to humblebrag. I'm sharing because it reminded me that checking in with our past selves can help us recognize how we've grown, not only in the big parts of life, but also in our writing.

For example, when I read the paper that I wrote in graduate school, I see how much I've learned about writing and how much my writing has improved. Sometimes my inner critic chimes in about how much better I could have done in the past. But more often, my inner teacher reminds me of how much my writing has grown.

So if you're feeling like you're not making progress in your writing, channel your inner teacher. Read something that you wrote 5 or 10 years ago and think about how your writing has grown.

Onto this week's round-up...

💌 Round-up

💻 From My Desk

10 Helpful Tips for Communicating Research to the Public
Although you may be most comfortable writing in an academic style, this style is complex and confusing for many readers. And it fuels the communication gap between researchers and the general public. This article describes 10 tips that will help you write in a way that connects not just with a lay audience, but also with any reader.
 

👓 Reading

Health Literacy and Systemic Racism—Using Clear Communication to Reduce Health Care Inequities
"Typical written and spoken health information is unnecessarily complex, is written at too high of a reading level, is presented using unfamiliar jargon terms, and requires too high of numeracy skills for the average patient. This creates systemic disadvantages for patients with lower health literacy, who are more likely to identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, or Hispanic individuals."

🧰 Tools

Storytoolz
This website is still my go-to resource for improving the readability of my writing. I appreciate that the tool gives me an average readability score based on multiple readability measures. And I like that I get a wealth of information about what to target (eg, word length, sentence length, passive voice) to improve the readability of the text.

💬 Quote

"A talent grows by being used, and withers if it is not used. Closing the gap between expectation and reality can be painful, but it has to be done sooner or later. The fact is that millions of young people would like to write, but what they dream of is the published book, often skipping over the months and years of very hard work necessary to achieve that end..." – May Sarton

📝 Challenge

Open the most recent lay summary you've written and run the text through a readability measure, such as Storytoolz, the Hemingway App, or the Editor function in Word. Does your text meet the 8th-grade reading level recommended by the CDC, AMA, and NIH?

If you want to learn how to craft a readable and relatable lay summary, check out my Lay Summary Fundamentals course.

Thank you so much for reading.

Warmly,

Crystal