Writing “Blitzes” for Medical Educators

Objective: “I didn't go into medicine to write.” “I wasn't an English major.” “I just don't have time to write.” These comments, often heard among medical educators, reflect a serious problem for the advancement/promotion of medical educators and for their ability to build on each other's work. Writing continues to be the main way we share our innovations —and failures—with our colleagues. Yet medical educators are reluctant to write. To address obstacles of time and limiting beliefs, we developed the 12-minute writing “blitz” for physician educators. Description: Participants in a faculty development program must complete an education project and are encouraged to submit these projects to medical education meetings/journals. Using our writing blitz strategy, they are given explicit writing tasks and short bursts of time to complete them during our sessions. For example, in two minutes participants write the introduction to their medical education project using the following sentence-by-sentence strategy. Sentence 1: Describe the current problem/need that led you to do your project. Sentence 2: Describe the ideal state for that problem if it were solved. Sentence 3: Articulate the gap between the current problem and the ideal state. 4. State how your project/idea narrows the gap between the ideal and the current problem. Participants then present their ideas to see if it “grabs” the group, as potential readers. Ideas are then discussed, clarified, and typically reframed to place the specific innovation into a larger context of current issues within medical education. After this reframing, each participant is then required to write for 10 additional minutes giving a detailed description of the methodology and the discussion. Because the size of most published abstracts is between 250 and 500 words, participants are exhorted to “just write” with explicit directions including: “Do not edit… if you can't think of a word, leave it blank and keep writing.” The goal is to get ideas on paper, valuing for the moment quantity over quality. Participants then exchange their “abstract” with a colleague who makes general edits and returns it to the author who then takes those edits, makes corrections and forwards revisions to the session leaders for final critique and review before submission. Discussion: Those who “can't write” often are astounded at the quantity and quality of the material that emerges from these short, focused writing blitzes. We have recently pilot tested this writing blitz technique for longer projects such as literature reviews and journal articles. Session evaluations for both the abstract and the longer paper are extremely positive, and attendance at these programs is high, indicating that the technique is successful. Preliminary data on the use of this technique to write reports to submit to Academic Medicine's In Progress reveal that in 1998 and 1999, approximately 80% of the workshop-drafted reports were submitted. More importantly, successful creation and submission of an actual product can change physician educators' belief that “I just don't have time to write.”