





































 V38 N4 / 2023 

©2023 American Medical Writers Association. All rights reserved.  
ISSN 2163-5315

AMWAJournal.org     20

ABSTRACT
A high-performing medical writing team begins and ends 
with talented writers, editors, and leaders who understand 
their mission and their business. A panel of writers compris-
ing the authors convened virtually on October 28, 2021, at the 
American Medical Writers Association National Conference 
to discuss this topic. The topics of value proposition and busi-
ness models; communication, leadership, and corporate 
responsibility; and financial acumen will be reprised in this 
3-part series. The series will also include thoughts from the 
authors looking to the future of the business of medical  
writing, including what we can do in the medical writing 
community to introduce these concepts earlier in the med-
ical writing career path. This Part 2 manuscript focuses on 
communication, leadership, and corporate responsibility.

A high-performing medical writing team begins and ends 
with talented writers, editors, and leaders who understand 
their mission and their business: the value proposition, the 
finances that drive strategy and decision-making, the finan-
cial goals, and effective communication.
 A panel of writers comprising the authors convened  
virtually on October 28, 2021, at the American Medical 
Writers Association (AMWA) National Conference to  
discuss this theme.1

 The topics of value proposition and business models,2 
communication, leadership, and corporate responsibility, 
and financial acumen will be reprised in this 3-part series, 
along with thoughts from the authors looking to the future 
of the business of medical writing, including what we can do 
in the medical writing community to introduce these topics 
earlier in the medical writing career path. This Part 2 man-
uscript focuses on communication, leadership, and corpo-
rate responsibility.
 The authors’ collective experience comprises the follow-
ing medical writing work environments:

• Freelance business
• Small business/vendor

• Department leadership of small- to mid-size biotech 
company and large-sized pharmaceutical company

 The moderator’s (Joan Affleck - JA) prompt is provided 
for each topic, followed by each perspective on the topic. In 
some cases, text from the session has been paraphrased for 
optimal clarity in this medium.

COMMUNICATION IN A BUSINESS CONTEXT
JA: There’s so much to being a business leader. We’ve talked 
about value proposition, business models, finances;2 
another area I want to touch on is communication. Now—
communication: this is our stock-in-trade, right? We 
should get this part. But I’m willing to bet you have all dis-
covered that communication is a little bit different in the 
business context, and I wonder what kinds of communica-
tion situations you’ve run into and how you’ve used com-
munication to help your business succeed. Maybe you’ve 
had to speak differently with potential or actual custom-
ers, employees, and collaborators, maybe even a detractor. 
So, how do you see communication as being an essential 
element of business leadership or business acumen?

DD: It will make or break you, regardless of where you sit. 
That’s the bedrock of what we do, and people ask you all 
the time as a medical writer—“So, what is it that you do?” If 
you can explain that to them clearly and communicate what 
you’re doing, that’s half the battle because you’ve explained 
what the baseline is in terms of this conversation you’re 
having. Within teams it’s the same requirement: you need 
to explain to the team what it is you bring to the table, why 
you’re doing it, and what they need to know. The import-
ant thing for me and for my teams is to answer the ques-
tions before my teams ask them of the writer or the writing 
team—to anticipate things, to have a contingency plan in 
place, and to be able to communicate that to put the client 
(and that is the team, in my case) at ease with the sense that 
the writer and the writing team have been here before and 
can see what’s coming before I can see it. If we can do that, 

The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership,  
and Corporate Responsibility
Joan Affleck, MBA1; Dominic De Bellis, PhD1; Brian Bass, MWC2; and Jeanette M. Towles, MA, RAC-Drugs3/  
1Merck & Co, Inc, Rahway, NJ; 2Bass Global, Inc, Fort Myers, FL; 3Synterex, Inc, Dedham, MA

TOPICAL FEATURE

PART 2 IN A 3-PART SERIES

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AMWAJournal.org     21The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility

it takes away a lot of the tension within the team that really 
doesn’t need to be there. And it comes with experience, I 
agree, but you can communicate to the team, “This is the 
first time doing this kind of project; we need to learn a few 
things from you, but I’d like to help you with what we bring. 
We know how to write the document, but we have to work 
together.” And that’s OK, too, but as long as that’s explained 
up front, people understand where everybody’s coming 
from. Again, it’s this same transparency of communication 
that carries the weight of the work forward in a good way.

JA: That “taking away the pain” that Jeanette talked about 
earlier.2

DD: Right, as much as possible. The writers are the docu-
ment development experts, and they know many things 
about the regulations and all the trappings around what has 
to take place with the document. The team members have to 
focus on their expertise, or the client has to focus on what-
ever this product is that you’re contributing to; we have to 
help them not worry about our piece of it to the degree we 
can, and that’s important.

JA: As some of you have mentioned earlier—everyone 
learns to write; therefore, they think they are the writer, so 
we may need to get them to stay in their swim lane!

JT: I think communication is so important, too, in just being 
able to explain to your clients what you think the gains 
are going to be. The best example of this I had was when I 
was working in-house in a department and was in a meet-
ing with a senior regulatory person and the president of 
the company, who was a typical MBA—very focused on 
the return on investment and [having] very bold goals for 
her company. They were talking about narratives and how 
those are done, and I made the mistake of saying, “This is 
the industry-standard way of doing this,” and I found out 
later that this was a phrase that tended to make her head 
explode! But it took that other senior leader in regulatory 
leading me down the path in this meeting to say, “OK, well, 
I understand that, but which parts of this process can we 
break down—which parts do we need to stay married to, to 
maintain the quality, and which parts can we potentially try 
to be a little more bold about?” I immediately saw where she 
was going with it, too;…I understood that what I had said 
was maybe not the right thing to say. Having someone who 
you can observe and who can model that behavior to help 
you translate what you are trying to say from a medical writ-
ing standpoint into something that makes sense to some-
one who is interested in that return on investment is critical. 
Again, that’s where that mentoring comes back in; and it 

doesn’t even have to be someone within a medical writing  
group, it could be a senior leader in regulatory or some 
other adjacent function who can help navigate and model 
some behaviors.

BB: From a freelancer’s standpoint, I think there are 3 key 
communication areas that freelancers need to pay most 
attention to, and if they do, it will really help with their suc-
cess (and by that, I mean delivering their value to their cli-
ents) (Figure 1). The first is responsiveness. The only thing 
worse than when a client reaches out to you with a new 
project and they don’t hear from you, is when you are in the 
middle of a project and the client reaches out to you and 
gets crickets. Nothing will instill apprehension faster than 
that. We’re all busy and know how hard that is, but one of 
the things I’ve worked very hard at is responding almost 
immediately to clients, even if it’s just to say, “Hey, I got 
your message; I’m in the middle of something, and I’ll get 
back to you later”—just so they know I’m here and on top 
of things. The second thing is confidence when I’m speak-
ing with clients—trying to speak the language of the project 
and the work that needs to be done so my client knows that 
I get it, that I understand what we are all talking about. This 
gives them the confidence to move past “Can they do the 
job?” and get into “Let’s get them the information they need 
to get the job done.” The third thing is frankness. Where the 
other 2 things are probably mostly of benefit to the client, 
this third thing is really of benefit to the freelancer. People 
who are on staff don’t think about certain business aspects 
the way freelancers do, and I find myself having to explain 
in very lay terms why things work differently for freelancers 
than they do for staff people. As a quick example, I estimate 
projects and invoice on a project basis rather than an hourly 
basis. A lot of clients don’t get this. I find it helps clients to 
understand me better when I explain to them that if a proj-
ect is ultimately, let’s say, $1,000 for the sake of argument, 
does it really matter if it takes me 10 hours or 2 hours to get to 
the end result, or 20 hours? It shouldn’t, because the bottom 
line is, can it get done within the budget, and is it done prop-
erly? The better we get at what we do, [we] also get faster at it. 
Because there is a limit to what anyone will pay on an hourly 
basis for someone, it forces us to work more the better we 
get in order to earn the same money we made when we were 
less experienced. When I lay it out in those terms to clients, 

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AMWAJournal.org     22The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility

you can see a little lightbulb go on that they understand the dynamics 
involved, and I find that helps build the relationship.

JA: Is that the same for you, Jeanette, in your business?

JT: Slightly different. I think historically—and I totally agree with every-
thing Brian just said to a large extent—we do tend to go in the time and 
materials direction for the main reason that when you have an expanded 
network, you would really have to have a lot of capital behind you to be 
able to absorb the type of risk you would need to. Say the project gets 
delayed and you can’t bill for a unit until 3 months from now—well, you 
still have to pay your people. It really depends on the individual circum-
stances and what type of business model makes sense. But [as] we’ve 
also been considering lately, does that make sense for some of our clients 
but not all of them? I think you have to have the acumen to know when 
to reexamine your model, and it should be done frequently to make sure 
that it still makes sense and is optimizing the amount of time you put into 
what the dollar amount actually ends up being in the business. A kind of 
dual approach is needed there—and the ability to be self-reflective about 
it.

JA: And look at that: you’ve brought in the finance with communication 
and business model all in one example, and you added in that really 
interesting factor of being able to assess risk in business. Fascinating! We 
have described this panel discussion in the brochure for the conference 
as being for midcareer writers. But afterward, I realized we don’t really 
know when we should be talking about and teaching writers business 
skills. What are your thoughts about that: is midcareer the right time, or 
do you have a different idea?

BB: I vote for teaching it from the very beginning.

DD: Day 1—agreed.

BB: When we’re learning how to write, we should be learning economics 
and finance—and teaching it.

JT: I completely agree. From the freelancer perspective, one of the things 
I’ve intentionally done recently is talking about the sales funnel in our 
operations group (Figure 2). Again, for us, that’s people coming in ear-
lier in their career and learning the operational aspects; they may or may 
not aspire to be medical writers, [but] they need to understand where 
those touch points are with the clients, and why those things are import-
ant to that concept of operational excellence, which is our pitch. Because 
if they don’t, we’re not able to achieve that operational excellence. They 
also need to understand what keeps the client coming back in the sales 
funnel, which is the ultimate goal; you don’t want to court a client once 
and then have them leave you—that wouldn’t be time well invested. So, 
helping people who are coming into the department understand where 
they fit into it—not only once but continually—is a return on investment 
for [my taking] the time to talk about that.

Figure 1. Three key areas for communication for 
medical writers.

Figure 2. The sales funnel. Adapted from: Crail C, 
Bottorff C. Sales funnel template and examples for 2023. 
Forbes Advisor, July 3, 2023.3

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AMWAJournal.org     23The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility

DD: In particular—more so for the freelancer than for the 
in-house employee—each of us has to know what our value 
is in terms of what we bring to the client. And if we don’t 
know how much we can bill, or how much we are worth, 
or what it is we think we can demand for what it is we are 
asked to do, then the whole idea of business dissolves. If 
you’re providing something and expecting to be paid for it, 
by definition you’re in business, like it or not; and you have 
to understand that if you’re offering someone a product and 
expecting them to give you money, then all of the trappings 
of that understanding have to go hand-in-hand—you can’t 
have the work product and the money be separate and not 
think about or not understand [the relationship of] one to 
the other.

JA: I think that, too, even in a corporate situation in which 
you might feel a little bit more removed, there’s benefit 
in owning your project more, owning those cycle times, 
owning the quality rating of your project—to take pride in 
that and work toward higher standards.

BB: Freelancers need to understand where they are in the 
food chain. It really comes back to this value proposition2; 
in order for everyone to be able to make money and jus-
tify costs, there has to be that “wow factor” at the end that 
makes everyone say, “That was really a great experience—
let’s do that again.”

JA: Love it! [Because] none of us benefited from a formal 
program to teach us about the business aspects of medi-
cal writing, let’s do a little futuristic thinking, a little pie 
in the sky: if you could help design a program, what would 
that include? What are some examples of the best ways for 
writers and editors and leaders in medical writing and 
medical communication to actually acquire business liter-
acy—what do you think we need to put in place?

BB: From a financial standpoint, I would recommend 
courses in bookkeeping, estimating, budgeting.... Whether 
you are a freelancer or someone who is ultimately going to 
run a department, you need to know all those things.

DD: You have to be an expert project manager. You have 
to understand time and materials and how much you can 
accomplish in a unit of time. [That emphasizes] the impor-
tance of the right metrics calculated and maintained rou-
tinely [to] give you data from which you can better cost your 
projects. To Brian’s point on the project basis, if he didn’t 
know what he could do in a unit of time, he would never 
be able to come up with a project estimate that was of any 
value; you have to understand what you can do. We have to 

teach the writer to understand themselves at the beginning, 
[to] know what they can do and say, “OK, I can write 1,000 
words in 2 hours,” and that means I can write a manuscript 
every 3 days [or whatever that happens to be], and therefore 
I can do 2 manuscripts per week. [Only] then you can begin 
to see how all these pieces add up, and that’s the important 
part—to make the connection between the academic work 
we know as writing and the numeric concepts we associ-
ate with business. But the 2 things have to go together; they 
can’t be separate.

JT: One component I might add to that—and this might 
surprise you—[is] emotional intelligence. One of the hing-
ing points of my career was [when] someone handed me 
[Daniel Goleman’s] book Emotional Intelligence,4 and we 
read it as a group in the department. Again, this was in the 
context of a regulatory department, so there were lots of 
benefits in terms of being able to use that material if you 
were presenting to the [US Food and Drug Administration], 
but you could also use it to leverage conversations with 
your colleagues in other departments and bring them to a 
point of alignment on certain issues.... Studies have actu-
ally shown that [although] for certain skills you can’t teach 
an old dog new tricks, emotional intelligence is not one of 
them; it’s one you can continue working on no matter how 
advanced you are in your career. So, [this applies] not only 
for those just coming in, but also continually throughout 
your career, as well as in leadership [positions].

LEADERSHIP
JA: Another thing that I think you all have touched on at 
one point or another is this idea of mentoring and observ-
ing and having access to leaders that you can just observe 
and learn what tricks they have up their sleeves to make 
the business work. Do any of you have an example from 
your own experience of how your understanding of busi-
ness has helped you lead a team through a period of  
significant change? We all know change is the only con-
stant, and I’m just wondering how it has served you.

BB: For me, an area that’s a good example is negotiating. 
Part of my goal—and maybe that’s why my particular free-
lance model seems to work pretty well for me—is for all the 
freelancers on my team to make as much money as possi-
ble and make the client say, “Wow, that was fantastic—let’s 
do that again!” Therein lies the value for all of us. But we all 
come to the table with various skills, and some of them are 
strong, and some of them are not. One of the areas I find 
myself working with the freelancers on my team on is when 
the client pushes back on an estimate. The one thing I think 
I’ve taught to everyone on my team is to be really open and 

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honest in our conversations with the client about where they 
think things went off, so we can go back and look at the way 
we prepared the estimate to see where we may have gone 
wrong. As much experience as we all have, we’re not always 
perfect, and to have the opportunity to have clients feel open 
enough that they can come back and discuss money with 
you, which is something no one is comfortable talking about, 
is really great for me. Because 9.5 out of 10 times, we end up 
coming to an agreement that works for everyone.

JT: Obviously, one challenge that everyone had is COVID. 
Within our business, when it first began, we saw a lot of ear-
ly-phase stuff fall off the map if it wasn’t in a critical area, so 
one thing that I think really preserved our business model 
at that point was the fact that we had diversified the types 
of things we work on. So, we work on a little bit of late-
phase stuff, a little early-phase stuff, a little in rare disease, 
a little in oncology; and so, because we took that approach 
intentionally and are looking all the time at how healthy 
our clients are—what are they bringing in in terms of over-
all income, and do we need to pursue any new business—
we were able to quickly balance our portfolio once certain 
things started falling off at that point.

DD: I guess things are a little bit different in-house, but 
from a negotiation standpoint and an emotional intelli-
gence standpoint, [there is] absolutely the same obligation 
on the part of the writer to really know how to speak with 
the team, anticipate things, and really instill trust and con-
fidence. COVID changed our work environment, as it did 
for almost everyone, and we all ended up working remotely, 
which is different than the in-house team members were 
accustomed to by and large. As a manager, you have to be 
resilient and [amplify] that resiliency to your staff and get 
them to remain motivated in the right ways; and oftentimes 
that comes down to a lot of interpersonal interactions—
even more so from a 1:1 perspective than you may do oth-
erwise in normal business because we were all under these 
unusual pressures we had never faced before. Making an 
open acknowledgment that we are all in this new world 
together was important for everyone to understand and 
say, “Look, whatever this is, we’ll get through it one way or 
another, but we have to keep our eye on the work and give 
us some focus and a sense of purpose at the same time.” I 
think that really carried a lot of people forward in the right 
way…. At the end of the day, we are still people.

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
JA: I want to pull a little bit on this thread of corporate 
responsibility.2 How does that fit into your role as business 
leaders? For example, Dom, I know that where you work, 

the company has a big investment in corporate respon-
sibility, to the point where they give drugs away for free 
sometimes. Do you see that play out in your department?

DD: Yes, because at least from the leadership standpoint, 
many of my colleagues are committed to medical writing, 
and they understand what the field is about. And that’s 
really a unique component, in that having that breadth of 
knowledge about what medical writing is and what it takes 
to do it allows us to focus on the people in our teams and 
try as we can to develop them to their fullest potential. We 
have a responsibility to the people on the one hand, but the 
responsibility to society at large comes through at the end 
of the day when we bring the products through and market 
those drugs based on the filings we support. So, looking at 
all of these integrated pieces really allows us to contribute to 
that, and being at Merck has allowed us to be part of that.

JA: Others—comments on that piece about corporate 
responsibility?

JT: I always like to say profit and progress are not mutually 
exclusive. So, in continuing our business, making sure it is 
profitable, and doing all of the things a responsible business 
owner can do, I think there are opportunities for the team to 
get involved in things they care about. As an example, this 
summer we ran an internship for the first time, [which both] 
afforded us the potential to expand the available resource 
pool to medical writing in general [and offered] something 
that wasn’t really out there for this particular group of indi-
viduals. It was really a pilot for us, so we... are going to keep 
working on that [using our first intern’s feedback]; everyone 
who was involved with that process was really energized 
by it, too, and that’s something that is easy to forget some-
times. But it’s something we really play close to the heart 
here because we have a particular viewpoint as a disabili-
ty-owned business in terms of some of the challenges we 
have faced over time in industry, and we want to use that 
experience to make the pathways positive for anyone who 
does want to enter the field from any walk of life.

JA: Music to my ears! We have an internship program and 
an apprenticeship program in my department.

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AMWAJournal.org     25The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility

BB: My company is not large enough to have an internship 
program, so I do a lot of mentoring. It’s important to me to 
do that as a way of giving back to the industry I’m in and 
giving back to the world that I work in and live in, to help 
bring people up to that level of experience and expertise 
that make them someone I could bring onto my team. But 
unlike my colleague’s groups in which you have a certain 
amount of work to do and need to bring people in to do it, 
my company doesn’t have to grow to bring in people to do 
work; I’d rather not take work that we’re not qualified and 
do not have the best people to do, so I’m in a position to be 
able to flex that in the opposite direction.

JA: I think we do a little bit of both, right Dom?

DD: At times, yes. We try to provide balance for our people, 
and we try to move the work around in a way that’s manage-
able for all involved. It doesn’t always work out the way we’d 
like it to, but again, nothing is perfect.

JA: In terms of taking on new work, though, we are simi-
lar in philosophy, Brian, in that we don’t just take on work 
for the sake of taking on work. We take on work for which 
we feel we are qualified and to which we feel we will really 
bring added value.

BB: That really is the bottom line. The worst circumstance 
anyone could find themselves in professionally is to realize 
down the line they should have said no.

JT: Yeah, absolutely, and I would say the converse is also 
true. Some of the best experiences I’ve had professionally 
have been when I was afraid to say yes. I was offered a pro-
motion, and I had a 9-month-old. Well, that was a tough 
one, but I said yes, and I was better in the long run for it as 
hard as it was. But weighing those options is important no 
matter what you decide.

BB: And that is how we stretch ourselves—you’re exactly 
right, Jeanette. If we don’t say yes to things that we’re not 
positive we can do, then we never learn how to do them. We 
never prove to ourselves we can do them. I guess it’s being 
sensitive to where that magical line is.

DD: But knowing who to ask if you have questions along the 
way also helps, right Brian?

BB: Oh yes, indeed, Dom—absolutely. Yes—someone you 
can turn to, to get that leg up when you need it.

LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE
In Part 1 of this 3-part series, the authors discussed how this 
panel was an initial dialogue meant to “kick off a broader 
discussion of the many aspects of business leadership as 
it applies to our work as medical communicators.”1 The 
authors concluded that having a comprehensive business 
curriculum, namely a pathway whereby medical writers can 
readily learn the skills needed to demonstrate leadership 
while also participating in decision-making activities earlier 
in their careers, would benefit the writer toward the goal of 
developing a strategic mindset while learning fundamental 
business topics.2

 One of the key functions of leaders is to execute on a 
business’s strategic plan, which outlines corporate goals 
that are intended to “trickle down” to departments and indi-
viduals.5 Well-stated goals might even ensure the goal is in a 
specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based 
(SMART) format—but, typically, a strategic plan only tells 
you what the goal is (eg, file New Drug Application [NDA] 
for Drug XYZ in Q1 of 2023”) and occasionally the metric it 
will be measured by (eg, authorization of XYZ in the US by 
start of Q2 2023). The plans most often do not cover the how 
or the why of arriving at that particular outcome. If you are 
a leader focusing intensely on doing your best to meet the 
company’s goals, you could still be missing a very import-
ant part of the equation. Here is an example: as a leader, you 
looked at the above corporate goal for filing the Drug XYZ 
NDA, and you did your diligence and determined you need 
to hire a new vendor to be able to complete the work. You 
did not realize that procurement has been given a direc-
tive to increase diversity and inclusion by trying to onboard 
small and diverse vendors, so your vendor selection and 
qualification process became delayed and could now com-
prise a risk to the submission deadline. This background 
discussion was not part of the corporate goal but became 
critical toward understanding how the company wanted the 
goal met and wanted business to be done to optimize cor-
porate responsibility.
 After all, learning to communicate about business—
and, most importantly, how to listen to what is important 
to business leaders—is currently not a distinct component 
of medical writing education.6-8 As previously discussed,2 
the AMWA Recommended Training Outline for Regulatory 
Writers6 acknowledges that the skills in the outline are only 
some of the skills and proficiencies needed for professional 
success but does not distinguish business knowledge as a 
separate training topic, although it does note that “soft skills 
are crucial for working efficiently, gaining trust, commu-
nicating and collaborating effectively with colleagues, and 
achieving personal and company goals.” The outline also 

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AMWAJournal.org     26The Business of Medical Writing: Communication, Leadership, and Corporate Responsibility

highlights leading without authority, influencing and per-
suading, and negotiation, which are some of the skills medi-
cal writing leaders need to acquire, but applying these skills 
in the day-to-day with teams on documents and applying 
them to a management audience are different endeavors. 
Exactly how these skills can be acquired and understood 
as early as possible in medical writers’ careers remains our 
fundamental challenge.
 At the end of the day, whether we are the CEO of a med-
ical writing group within a corporation, of our own corpo-
ration, or of our own freelance business, we all work for a 
company, and a company must have a way of doing, or an 
ethos, that guides its daily work. It is the responsibility of lead-
ership to build a bridge and ensure not only that a company’s 
goals are met but also that its ethos is incorporated into every-
day work in an authentic way to make certain that the out-
comes will be positive and sustained over the long term. This 
means that medical writers in leadership (or pondering lead-
ing) should strive to understand the importance of corpo-
rate responsibility and actively seek to connect their personal 
ethos with that of the company, as well as to communicate 
that outward to their medical writing teams and customers.

Author declaration and disclosures: J. Affleck and D. De Bellis 
are employed by Merck & Co, Inc, and are shareholders. B. Bass 
and J. Towles note no commercial associations that may pose a 
conflict of interest in relation to this article.

Author contact: jtowles@synterex.com

References
1.  American Medical Writers Association. National Conference 

Brochure. AMWA; 2021. Accessed July 3, 2022. https://
cdn.ymaws.com/www.amwa.org/resource/resmgr/
conference/2021/2021amwa_conf_program_june15.pdf

2.  Affleck J, De Bellis D, Bass B, Towles J. The business of medical 
writing: understanding the value proposition and successful 
business models [Part 1 in a 3-part series]. AMWA J. 2023;38(2): 
21-25.

3.  Crail C, Bottorff C. Sales funnel template and examples for 
2023. Forbes Advisor. Updated July 19, 2023. Accessed July 3, 
2023. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/sales-funnel-
template/

4.  Goleman D. Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books; 2005.
5.  Towles J. Creating a strategic plan for a medical writing 

department. AMWA. April 14, 2021. http://amwa.
mycrowdwisdom.com/diweb/catalog/item/id/6497462

6.  Yih L, Alexander LL. Recommended Training Outline for 
Regulatory Writers. American Medical Writers Association 
(AMWA); 2020. Accessed March 3, 2023. https://info.amwa.org/
hubfs/Offers/regulatory-writer-training%20ebook/regulatory-
writer-training.pdf

7.  Clemow DB, Wagner B, Marshallsay C, et al. Medical 
Writing Competency Model - section 1: functions, tasks, 
and activities. Ther Innov Regul Sci. 2018;52(1):70-77. 
doi:10.1177/2168479017721585

8.  Clemow DB, Wagner B, Marshallsay C, et al. Medical Writing 
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