The Society of Medical Writers 2022 Spring Conference will be held on-line on the morning of Saturday May 21st.
The subject will be ‘Professional writing’: how to write well about medicine and healthcare.
It will include three major strands:
1. Conveying factual scientific and medical matters using the medium of fiction: advantages, disadvantages and bear-traps.
2. Tips for writing factual medical documents (research papers, essays, management plans, medicopolitical opinions) that are well-written, interesting and easy to read.
3. “Supporting the unsupportable and saying the unsayable” – responding to professional opposition to new ideas.
We are delighted to have as guest speaker Dr Mike McCulloch, a lecturer at Plymouth University – a physicist, not a medic – who has developed a whole new principle in physics called ‘Quantised Inertia’, which, if proved, will solve several awkward aspects of cosmology and astrophysics. In addition, one of its applications is to also allow very much faster interstellar travel. Crucially, he has both written a factual book about it, and also a novel for lay audiences describing his theory and showing the benefits it could lead to.
(NB – the conference will only briefly touch upon the physics of Mike’s theory: our real focus of attention, with him, will be on how to put complex scientific matters across clearly in ways that non-specialised people can appreciate, and also how best to deal with controversy relating to factual matters.)