From public service announcements and policy briefs to grant proposals and research articles, clear, concise writing is critical to public health practice. The importance of clarity and the perils of confusion have been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic, as public health professionals and researchers have struggled to communicate clear messages to the public.

In her new book, Teaching Public Health Writing, Jennifer Beard, a clinical associate professor of global health at the School of Public Health, calls on schools and programs of public health to rethink the place and role of writing in public health education. Drawing from her interdisciplinary background in population health and the humanities, Beard uses public health theory, narrative examples, and sample writing assignments from classrooms across disciplines to offer guidance in redesigning in-course writing instruction. She aims to ensure the next generation of public health professionals have the tools and confidence they need to communicate effectively.

Teaching Public Health Writing is the first in a new series of primers for public health professionals and faculty, Teaching Public Health: An Integrated Approach. The series aims to provide instructors with tools and techniques to meet educational trends within the field. It is co-edited by Lisa Sullivan, associate dean for education, and Dean Sandro Galea.

At Boston University, Beard is the associate editor of Public Health Post, faculty lead of the Public Scholarship Shop within the Narrative Office at the Center for Antiracist Research, and the director of SPH’s Public Health Writing Program. She is also the founder of the BU Program for Global Health Storytelling, a collaboration between SPH, the BU College of Communication, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

She spoke about her new book, its key takeaways, and why a book like this is needed right now.

Why is it important that public health practitioners have good writing and communication skills, especially as we continue to grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic?

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought the challenges we all face in our role as public health communicators into stark focus. The words we use matter, as do the level of nuance and detail we choose to include. We have heard so much about the communication failures, but we haven’t talked as much about what has worked in terms of communication or why crystal-clear consistent messaging has been more or less impossible when our knowledge was constantly evolving alongside a quickly mutating virus.

Public health practitioners need to simultaneously hone both their humility and confidence when it comes to anything we write or say. Our message can always be better, but at some point, it has to be good enough. We need the confidence to speak up, to lead the conversation with evidence and clear guidance. But we also need to acknowledge the limitations of what we are saying at any given point. It’s not an easy balance to achieve.

What are the main takeaways of the book?

One thing I want readers to walk away with is the understanding that writing is a practice and a process, not a competency. You do not just learn how to write, master the technique, and easily reproduce it forever after. It takes a lot of practice and revision. This very much contradicts the approach we take when teaching public health, where there are set competencies and learning objectives. Throughout the book, I try to critique this approach and reframe communication-based competencies to focus more on engaging with the process of drafting and revising.

I also remind my colleagues to think about their own relationship with writing when reading student papers. Writing is difficult for everyone, professors and students alike.  The challenges we face may be different because of our years of practice and experience, but we all benefit from feedback. And we all need to revise.

Finally, I want readers to know that we all have the ability to mentor student writers, no matter our discipline or training. Often professors feel like they don’t have the necessary expertise, they are “just” a researcher or an epidemiologist and they are not trained to teach writing. We need to reframe the way that we think about mentoring student writers. You don’t need to be an expert in composition theory and rhetoric, you just need to be able to read something and say, “This doesn’t make sense to me. Here is where I get confused. Can you tell me what you mean here?” We do it all the time.

Throughout the book, you use traditional public health models and theories to frame how we can and should think about writing and the writing process. Can you talk more about this and how it shows up in the book?

My teaching and research focus on the ways in which context determines health and wellbeing. So, over the years, using the life course approach, harm reduction, and the social ecological model to think through complex challenges has become second nature.

Meeting people where they are is a core principle of harm reduction and any kind of teaching, mentorship, or collaboration. So that is always the first step. We are never going to write a perfect draft, and we cannot make it all better at once. It is step by step by step, draft by draft by draft over the course of our lives.

The life course approach helps us think about how our abilities and needs change based on where we are at in our education or professional development. People are at different stages of their lives or training, and that means different things for different people.

And the social ecological model really helped me think about what it means to be part of a community of writers. Public health schools and programs need to support individual writers (students, professors, and staff) by investing in institutional resources (like peer coaching), ongoing community conversations, and interpersonal mentoring.

Who is this book for?

I wrote the book for my colleagues who are teaching public health at the graduate and undergraduate level. I hope it will be useful to anyone who is teaching public health classes, but I specifically had my colleagues at SPH in mind because of the many conversations we have had about mentoring student writers since I joined the faculty in 2005.

Mentoring public health graduate students can be particularly tricky because our masters and doctoral students come to us from so many disciplines and professional pathways. Many already have strong preconceived notions about their own writing ability. Some are confident, others are deeply worried, and many are somewhere in-between.

A new MPH student may have excelled at writing papers for their English literature or political science classes, and they will now have to learn a new way of writing. Then there are the students who have never written formal papers. As professors, we need to meet everyone where we they are. We can’t expect that they already know how to write the policy briefs and literature reviews we assign in our classes.

The final chapter of the book offers examples of writing assignments and evaluation checklists and rubrics developed by professors here at SPH and other institutions. I hope readers will use these examples as templates and inspiration for designing their own assignments. I see this sharing as one more way that we can build our sense of being part of a writing community both within and across our educational institutions.

Teaching Public Health Writing is available for purchase here. To read more of Beard’s musings on public health writing, subscribe to her blog here.