As we told you last week, dear readers, February 9 marked CH’s 15th birthday! So to keep the celebration going just a bit longer, in lieu of our standard archive post this week (which just happens to fall on the 15th), we’re rounding up 15 favorites from the archive.
And it wasn’t easy to choose just 15! A couple were pretty clear off the bat — of course we had to include the launch of our Equity-Centered Health Communication Framework, for example. There have also been a handful of posts that feel similarly foundational to our work and our company, like those on the importance of empathy in health comm and how health literacy, as we ❤️ to say, is a state and not a trait.
We also wanted to include a few posts from our unofficial series on common public health industry terms that we think need to go. We’re looking at you “target audience,” “hard-to-reach populations,” and “vulnerable communities!”
And in perhaps the understatement of the century, COVID gave us a lot to think and write about. You could even say that the pandemic put health comm on the proverbial map (we did say that, actually), and it put massively important conversations — like how we need to name racism (not race) as a risk factor for disease — on display in the mainstream, where they belong.
COVID also had us thinking a lot about how to dispel harmful myths, even how to get ahead of those myths before they get too much traction. And although the post is from pre-COVID times, tips for writing about U-turns in health guidance proved useful again and again.
It seems wrong not to include at least a couple of posts on more technical writing topics, so here we’ll remind plain language writers everywhere of 2 of your very best friends: the Oxford comma (superpower: ensuring clarity) and also zombies (superpower: fighting passive voice).
Finally, we’re going to close this post out with a bit of an outlier — but we enjoyed researching and writing it so much that we want to make sure you caught our celebration of LGBTQ+ public health/health comm heroes!
Whew, we’re pretty worn out after all that reminiscing. Time to relax with a movie. Perhaps we’ll throw on… Contagion?
Copy and paste to share on social: This week, to keep the 15th birthday celebration going, the CommunicateHealth team is rounding up 15 favorite We ❤️ Health Literacy posts (and on the 15th no less!): https://bit.ly/4bC7cLM #HealthLiteracy #HealthComm
Browse recent posts