Report writing
Legal Nurse Consultants: Are You Writing in Geek?
Are you writing in geek? What do I mean? Imagine you are an attorney who has hired a legal nurse consultant to summarize and analyze complex obstetrical medical records. You don’t understand medical terminology and you know that the information in the record is crucial to understanding the case. You give the records to the…
Read MoreLong Term Care Primer – Specialty Documents
Long term care is a highly litigated area of health care. As a legal nurse consultant (LNC) without a clinical background in long term care, I had to educate myself on this specialty. The nursing tasks were familiar but the chart was not. As I worked on more of these cases, I came to rely…
Read MoreAvoid guff in your marketing materials
Guff is the language of the bureaucrat. It is pompous, needlessly complex, and obscures understanding. The person who writes in guff uses long sentences, filled with stiff language, and technical terms. Here is an example of guff from a legal nurse consultant’s website: “Screening Medical Cases For Merit – I will document the departure from…
Read MoreTop 3 Grammatical Errors
Avoid these top 3 grammatical errors if you want to present yourself as a skilled legal nurse consultant writer. Use of the apostrophe Last week I was setting up books on a table for a book sale. One of the books I came across was called “Cave of the Bat’s”. I was horrified, not by…
Read MoreWhy writing a report is based on your reader
Whenever you sit down to prepare a report, think about your audience. Who is going to read this report? What are his or her needs, level of understanding of medicine, and objectives? Writing a report is based on the needs of your reader – address each of these points. Ask yourself, “What do I want…
Read MoreUsing lists in legal nurse consulting reports
Lists improve the readability of legal nurse consulting report. They make it easy to cluster information together in a format that can be quickly scanned. Lists are useful for breaking up a long sentence into a more reader friendly format. They break up the style and flow of a report and create a more interesting…
Read MoreLegal nurse consultants: How to lose a client in one report
Want repeat business? Do you want to know how to lose a client – so you don’t? Here are some report “don’ts”. Striking the wrong key Relying on the computer to function as the only proof reader of your LNC report is sure to miss a few common typographical or grammatical errors. An example I…
Read MoreCommon Pitfalls in Report Writing
The inexperienced legal nurse consultant learns in the same way as the new clinical nurse – through on the job training. In nursing school we gain a tremendous amount of “book smarts” in the classroom but the most valuable training is accomplished in the clinical setting. Likewise, a nurse can learn the basics of legal…
Read MoreHow do I organize my report?
Bill (name changed) has a book partially written sitting on the hard drive of his computer. He reads other books written on the same subject and says, “My book is better.” But he is stuck, unable to finish it. When I asked Bill why he was blocked, he said, “I’m dyslexic. I get lost in…
Read MoreWriting lists
Writing lists in reports improves the readability of a legal nurse consultant’s report. Lists make it easy to cluster information together in a format that can be quickly scanned. A list is useful for breaking up a long sentence into a more reader friendly format. Writing lists breaks up the style and flow of a…
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