
“Please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it. It’s always worth it.”
— Hillary Clinton
“Please never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it. It’s always worth it.”
— Hillary Clinton
We all know how important it is to keep health-related content short, simple, and direct. But of course that’s not all that goes into clear communication — the order of the words you choose matters, too. Specifically, when you’re writing content that may not apply to all your readers, it’s important to put the context first.
Consider this sentence: You’ll need to get a blood test if you’ve had a TB vaccine (shot).
Concise and direct? Check. Uses simple, familiar terms? Definitely. But this information is only relevant to readers who’ve had a TB vaccine — and you’re making everyone read all the way to the end before they find out if it applies to them.
So instead, try this: If you’ve had a TB vaccine (shot), you’ll need to get a blood test.
This way, it’s immediately clear who you’re talking about, and people who haven’t had a TB vaccine can skip the rest of the sentence. Since we know that readers skim and scan (especially online), do yours a favor and clue them in right away if there’s something that may not be relevant to them.
Putting the context first can also help users with limited literacy skills — who may struggle with working memory — get clearer takeaways from your content.
Consider this one: Call 911 or go to the emergency room at the nearest hospital right away if your child’s fever is 105 degrees or higher.
When you write a sentence like this, you’re asking folks to read — and remember — several things to understand whether they need to call 911. This can be tricky for people with limited literacy skills. The solution?
Context first! Like so: If your child’s fever is 105 degrees or higher, call 911 or go to the emergency room at the nearest hospital right away.
The bottom line: When communicating information that doesn’t apply to all your readers, put the context first.
Tweet about it: When communicating info that doesn’t apply to all your readers, @CommunicateHlth says put the context first: https://bit.ly/37ZpTwG #HealthLit
It’s abundantly clear at this point, dear readers, that the reason we get along so well is that we have a lot in common. We’re all a bunch of health literacy lovers with passionate feelings about things like white space, plain language, and user testing. In short, we’re the coolest.
Unfortunately, not everyone shares our commitment to making health information easier to understand. And the reality is that even your own organization might be stuck in the Dark Ages (and in the Dark Ages, health literacy wasn’t a thing).
Well, grab a torch because it’s time for you to lead your colleagues into the light. Here are some tips you can use to advocate for a health literate organization.
Give the facts.
Explain how health literacy affects us all: 9 in 10 people have limited health literacy, which means they struggle to find, understand, and use health information. And research shows that everyone — not just people with limited health literacy — benefits from health content that’s clear and easy to use.
Dispel the “plain language is dumbing down” myth.
If we had a nickel for every time we heard this one, we’d be kajillionaires (and we’d use it to run as many focus groups as our hearts desire)!
Plain language does not mean dumbing down your content. It means thinking about your readers, telling them only what they need to know, and using simple language to communicate your message.
Make it personal.
Health information is powerful — it can make us feel scared and confused or informed and empowered.
Encourage your coworkers to think about their loved ones and how they might feel reading your materials. Would they want their grandmother to get a fact sheet peppered with impenetrable jargon? How would they describe the issue in a way that would instead put her at ease and help her take action?
Explain the return on investment.
Yeah, yeah, readable health materials help consumers — but what about the big guy? The truth is that health literacy benefits organizations, too. If you distribute clear information, your audiences will be primed to:
Share tools.
Like many of us, your colleagues may have learned early on that good writing is formal writing — or that there’s no significant difference between a website that’s user-friendly and one that isn’t. So give your colleagues a hand by sharing tools they can use on the job. Here are a few of our favorites:
Start small.
Begin with small steps — like getting folks to use contractions when they write or encouraging them to collect a few audience insights before developing a product. Even these small wins can have a big impact on your work.
Who knows? Before long your colleagues may want to join the We ❤︎ Health Literacy family (and we’d really ❤︎ that).
The bottom line: Advocate for health literacy within your organization — it’ll be a win for your audiences and a win for your company, too.
So, you’re building a website — congrats! But before you start designing, dear readers, we have something very important (and possibly surprising) to tell you: when it comes to designing a website, it’s best to be predictable.
Designing a predictable site helps users get where they need to go quickly and easily because they intuitively know where to look for important things. This is especially important for health websites, because users may be stressed out or otherwise not feeling their best when they’re searching for health information.
In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug says: “When you’re creating a site, your job is to get rid of the question marks.” In other words, users shouldn’t need to ask themselves questions like:
Years of usability testing with all sorts of folks has taught those of us at We ❤︎ Health Literacy Headquarters some important lessons about how to design websites for predictability. Here are some tried-and-true tips:
And don’t fret, dear readers: predictable doesn’t mean boring! You can still dazzle your users with a gorgeously designed website that’s easy to use and great to look at.
The bottom line: Design your website to be predictable — your users will thank you!
In today’s fast-paced world, more and more people are getting their information from social media. And as you know, dear readers, it’s part of our job as health communicators to meet folks where they’re at.
Different forms of social media have different strengths, and we’ll talk about that in future installments of our social media series. But to begin with, we’re giving a shout-out to perhaps the oldest form of social media: the blog.
Why blog, you ask? Here’s why.
Of course, there are fewer things sadder than an old, abandoned blog — so make a plan to post regularly and be sure to respond to comments as they come in.
Now go forth and blog!
The bottom line: Blogging is a great way to build your brand and engage with your audience.
So you’ve decided to put your super awesome, totally health-literate material on the web so it’s available to internet users everywhere. Wahoo!
Now you have to choose a format, and it really boils down to 2 options: webpage or PDF. What’s a health writer to do? Let’s discuss!
Webpages
At We ❤︎ Health Literacy Headquarters, we generally prefer webpages. Why?
And let’s do a little myth busting: lots of folks think that you have to choose PDF if you want your material to be printable. But that’s just not true — webpages can be printer friendly, too! See Health Literacy Online to learn more about printable webpages and to check out an example — users can print the full document or specific sections, just like a PDF.
PDFs
One of the main cases for PDFs is that they’re downloadable, so it’s easy for users to save and share them. But what if people don’t have the right software to open the PDF after they’ve downloaded it? Without a program like Adobe Acrobat or Preview, they could be out of luck — and miss out on your masterpiece. (We don’t ❤︎ that, dear readers.)
If you ask us, the time to go PDF is when you’re creating a material that’s getting professionally printed — like a book or brochure. With a PDF, you lock in the appearance — including layout and style elements — so it will always look just how you want in print.
The bottom line: Want your online health material to be flexible, easy to use, and easy to update? Make it a webpage instead of a static PDF.
In 2014, more people died from drug overdoses than any other year in American history. Over half of these deaths involved an opioid — and about 78 people die from an opioid overdose in this country every day.
With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that CDC has declared an opioid overdose epidemic in the United States. And so it follows that health communicators may be getting a lot of work related to opioid abuse and overdose (we certainly are).
Opioids can be a tricky topic to cover — and it’s extremely important that health professionals of all disciplines are giving the overdose crisis the attention it deserves. So here are a few things to consider when writing plain language content about opioids and opioid overdose.
Keep your tone empathetic. If ever there’s a topic that reminds us how important empathy is in health writing, this is it. At all costs, avoid sounding condescending or judgmental. Remember how stigmatized people struggling with addiction are likely to feel — and use that to give your content the compassionate tone that will keep your readers, well, reading.
Use person-first language. Rely on phrases like “people who use/abuse/are addicted to opioids” or “people with opioid addiction.” Skip terms like “addicts” or “users” that imply folks’ addiction defines who they are.
Prioritize need-to-know information — really. When you’re writing for people who may be using drugs (or may have recently stopped using drugs), it’s extra important to keep content brief. Your readers may be high, sick, scared, or all of the above. Since illness and anxiety affect health literacy skills, skip anything that’s nice to know — critical information only.
Check your (community-specific) facts. A lot of the response to the opioid overdose crisis is happening at the community level, so beware of simply pulling information from national websites, however credible they may be.
For example, the cost of naloxone (a drug used to reverse opioid overdose) may be different depending on where you are — and the medicine kits themselves may look different. So, before you give instructions for how to buy or use it, make sure you know what your audience is likely to encounter.
You may also want to do a little research into legal matters. Are you writing a material encouraging people to call 911 if they witness an opioid overdose? If your state has a Good Samaritan law, you might want to mention it — but make sure you know what the law actually says before you do.
Remember friends and family. It’s hard to know how to help when a friend or family member is struggling with addiction. So, if it’s appropriate, consider creating some content for friends and family, too. Their support can go a long way in helping people who are addicted to opioids kick the habit for good.
The bottom line: The stakes are high for health communication materials about opioids and opioid overdose — so give this topic extra thought before you write.
This week, dear readers, we’re tackling a topic that often comes up in our work: gender and design. Of course, designs don’t actually have genders, but gender is a powerful concept in our culture — and we tend to interpret various design elements as masculine or feminine.
Marketers are especially fond of gender-specific product designs (remember Bic for Her pens?) because targeting a specific group of people can make them more likely to relate to a product. But gendered design has a dark side: it can reinforce stereotypes and even make women pay extra for their “womanly” products.
How does this apply to health communication? As you know, dear readers, it’s important to consider your audience and test your material if you can. But in general, it’s best to steer clear of very gendered design elements — even if you’re designing for a mostly single-gender audience.
Let’s say you’re designing a website for an OB/GYN practice. Before you decide to go with pink and flowers, think: do all women really like those things? Might they feel like you’re pandering to them? How would a transgender patient react to that design?
This isn’t to say that all design needs to be entirely gender neutral. For example, designers trying to evoke a feminine feel might consider using more curvy lines than straight ones — and someone looking for a very masculine feel might choose a bold color palette over a light one. The key is to focus on subtle cues that don’t rely on clichés or stereotypes.
The bottom line: When it comes to gendered design elements in health communication, less is usually more.
As you know, dear readers, communicating about treatment options to patients who are sick and scared is a big health literacy challenge. And what’s even harder? Communicating about medical care when every treatment is likely to cause more harm than good.
That is the tough — and important — subject of Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande.
The book is partly a history of care and treatment of older adults in the United States, and partly a rallying cry for doctors, patients, and family members to have honest conversations about what’s most important to someone with a terminal illness.
Gawande, a surgeon himself, asks: “When should we try to fix and when should we not?” To help people make the best decision, he lists a series of questions that get at both the patient’s understanding of the situation and what makes their unique life worth living.
We won’t spoil the ending by listing the questions here. For the full context, we definitely recommend reading the book, in which Gawande combines facts and data with compelling personal stories — including his own father’s death from cancer.
Of course, the conversations Gawande advocates for are hard. Few people want to talk about the inevitable, but Being Mortal offers both a reason and a way to do it. Because, as Gawande says: “Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal.”
The bottom line: Being Mortal explores options for making illness and death less harrowing — and more meaningful.
We know you’ve been there: you’re trying to find a specific piece of information on a website. You navigate to where you expect it to be — it’s not there. You find somewhere else it might fit, even if it’s a stretch — nothing. You can’t find it with the search function. You have failed, and you think, “I’m an intelligent, fairly tech-savvy human. Why can’t I find what I need?!”
It’s scenarios like this, dear readers, that keep us up at night. (No, really. It’s true.) And that’s why, in our latest installment on testing techniques, we’re focusing on usability testing.
When you’re creating a communication product, it’s important not to make any assumptions. Usability testing helps you get past assumptions and find out how easy (or hard) it is to use your website, tool, or print material.
By having real-life users give it a whirl, usability testing gives you invaluable feedback on your product’s navigation, labels, content, and design — feedback you can use to improve your product. And that, dear readers, means your target audience gets a product they can really understand and use.
Now, really. Who doesn’t ❤︎ that?
Keep these tried-and-true tips in mind when you do usability testing:
And don’t worry — usability testing doesn’t have to break the bank. Also, be sure to check out Steve Krug’s book Rocket Surgery Made Easy for more usability testing ideas.
The bottom line: Usability testing gives you super valuable feedback on how your product works (or doesn’t work) for your target audience.