Welcome to a combined edition of the chapter newsletter for the months of December 2023 and January 2024.

CHAPTER NEWS 

• Call for Volunteers!

• Chapter Gathering at the Urban Growler

• Chapter Members Attend AMWA Annual Meeting

• Book Club Selections for 2024

• Chapter Members Looking for Work

• Join our AMWA North Central LinkedIn Community! Link here. 

FEATURES 

• Freelancing: The Importance of Having a Diversified Client Base

• Breast Cancer Superheroes: Where are they Now? Ten Year Reunion Art Exhibit

• AMWA Essential Skills Certificate Course: Thoughts and Observations (Part 3: Sentence Structure)

CHAPTER NEWS

Call for Volunteers!

The North Central chapter is currently looking for volunteers to fill the positions of President-Elect, Co-Secretary, and Co-Membership Chair. AMWA North Central is a volunteer-based organization. New chapter members are encouraged to volunteer. Volunteering with AMWA is a great way to network with your fellow members, develop life-long friendships, and enhance your career development. It’s also a good way to fortify your C.V. with an extra line showing how you give back to your profession! If you can volunteer a few hours a month to help, please send a message to laurachapin@amwanorthcentral.org.

• President-Elect: The person in this role will attend monthly Board of Directors (BOD) meetings with other chapter officers and board members. They will put together meeting agendas and schedule virtual BOD meetings. This role is supported by the volunteers in the President and Past-President positions. This is typically a 3-year term. (1 year each for President-Elect, President, and Past-President)

• Co-Secretary: Join the current senior Co-Secretary to take meeting minutes at monthly BOD meetings, build and send email campaigns to all chapter members, and work on two chapter summary reports per year. This is typically a 3-year term.

• Co-Membership Chair: Join the current senior Co-Membership Chair to manage the roster of current chapter members.

We held our fall happy hour meeting at the Urban Growler in St Paul on November 16, 2023, and had a lively discussion in the main brewpub hall. Our meeting had a nice cross section of members from freelance, contract, and industrial lines of work (photo). The gathering provided an opportunity to learn about overlapping professional careers and aspirations. We had several freelancers who traded tips on leads for work, and others offered insight into regulatory and company writing. We also traded experiences and advice about jobs and job hunting. Several of the members attending were new or nearly new AMWA members and were able to get a better idea about the organization, the national meeting, workshops, and self-study modules. We also talked about the annual AMWA national meeting. We even managed to talk about new and interesting books (As the Book Club Coordinator, I am always looking for titles). Several good suggestions popped up, including an upcoming selection from Carl Elliott (The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No, due out May 24, 2024). We had discussed his earlier book, White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, at our January 25, 2016, Book Club. In short, the evening was enjoyable and provided lots of good conversation. 

Book Club Selections for 2024

Our Book Club celebrates its 18th continuous year with selections about health issues for the year to come. Although considerable interest exists in ways to improve health with exercise, diet, and lifestyle changes, these can only delay our inevitable end. These books provide a sampling of books about exercise, lifespan, and death:

• January 22, 2024: Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding by Daniel E. Lieberman. Exercise can provide multiple health benefits, but few of us engage in it to prevent or mitigate chronic diseases. The author provides tips about exercise and its potential benefits.

• April 22, 2024: Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To by David A Sinclair, PhD, with Matthew D LaPlante. Sinclair is the discoverer of sirtuins, molecules believed to influence aging. The author includes research about sirtuins as well as his take on their use as supplements. Disclaimer: Sinclair has founded a company that touts its benefits.

• September 23, 2024: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalininthi. This book is a short, inspiring account written by a surgeon about his battle with lung cancer. A nonsmoker, he discovered his illness at an advanced stage, and after a short remission, he relapsed. During his terminal decline, he wrote this book. He died shortly before completing it, and his wife edited it. The book offers inspirational thoughts on life.

Additionally, we are currently looking for selections for 2025. If you have read a book that you think might be book club-worthy, please forward us the title. Our book club has tried to include a rotating schedule of 3 topics: Writing or editing, biomedical, and fiction (usually, but not exclusively, medically related). We don’t always strictly adhere to this schedule. We often juggle the schedule to accommodate books of note, so don’t hesitate to send your suggestion(s).

Finally, a note for those curious about scheduling: Because both April and September have 5 Mondays, the book club will be held on its usual 4th Monday of those months. Please join us for stimulating discussions. One need not have read the book to join. You won’t be disappointed by the discussion. See you there.

Chapter Members Looking for Work

The following AMWA North Central Chapter members are currently looking for work. See below for their names and details on what kinds of jobs they’re interested in. If you know of someone who’s hiring, please reach out!

• Sarah Kuyack (skuyack@gmail.com)

  • Looking for jobs in: patient education, public health communication, website content, mental health, veterinary or human medicine 

  • Job type: full or part time, contract, freelance 

• Kristen Hutchison (kristen.hutchison1@gmail.com)

  • Area of interest: continuing medical education (CME), clinical research work, literature reviews, patient advocacy, and healthcare policy work

  • Portfolio

  • LinkedIn

If you’d like to add your name to this list, please contact the Publications Committee Chair Michael Franklin at franklin.editing@gmail.com.

FEATURES

Freelancing: The Importance of Having a Diversified Client Base

By Naomi Ruff

I started my freelance career when I was still a postdoctoral fellow. Tips from colleagues connected me with some editing services, and a small note on the bulletin board by the elevators from someone needing help with “writing on a topic in dermatology” brought me my first big writing project. This someone turned out to be another writer who wanted to subcontract the writing of a book on, of all things, Botox for wrinkles. (Those of you who know me will likely realize that this is not a topic close to my heart.) When it came time for me to leave the lab, this combination of work—limited though it was—was enough to preclude my taking a full-time job right away, and so I became a freelance by default.

Several months later, the person who had hired me to write the book disappeared. She stopped answering my calls or responding to my queries, and just like that my biggest paycheck had disappeared, too. Although I learned many things from that first big project (and my client did eventually resurface), one of the most important was not to depend too heavily on any one client.

I have kept to that motto pretty well over the years. In part, this is a good match for my personality: I enjoy learning new things, and new clients often bring new topics, document types, or audiences to explore. Having a mix of large and small projects also brings a kind of balance to my work life. Large projects allow me to focus for blocks of time, with minimal interruption for administrative tasks and the reassurance of larger payments coming in. In contrast, small projects mean that I can check items off the to-do list more frequently, and they are nice to turn to when I need a break from a big project or to fill in the time while the big-project client reviews a draft. Whatever your mix of project types, though, the jobs should be coming from multiple clients.

Since my unfortunate experience all those years ago, the business argument for diversifying my client base has only been strengthened. Now, as then, clients can disappear for all sorts of reasons—they want to bring the work in-house, they lost their big client who was funding your project, the company has been purchased or gone bankrupt, or they have learned so well from your example that they no longer need your help to write to high standards. Having other clients to turn to can make all the difference in keeping your business afloat.

Another, arguably more important, reason has developed over the past decade. The definitions of “employee” and “independent contractor” have changed in labor laws. These changes have led companies to worry that the government might deem the freelancers they work with to actually be employees who should be paid as such, with benefits and tax withholding—a determination that can result in fines and other problems for the company. This topic deserves an article of its own, but the relevant point here is that one piece of information used in making the determination is whether you earn more than 50% of your income from a single company. If you do, you are at risk of being declared an employee of that company. Conversely, spreading your services among multiple clients reinforces the notion that you are independent and the business owner that you really are.

The bottom line is that having a diversified client base is both good for your bottom line and for maintaining your business as an independent entity. And maybe it will keep your work more interesting, too!

Breast Cancer Superheroes: Where are they Now? Ten Year Reunion Art Exhibit

By Adam Fix

This past fall, Minnesota-based artist Barbara Porwit hosted an art exhibit celebrating the 10-year anniversary of her “Breast Cancer Superheroes” portrait project. The show was held from October 1 to November 26th at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

A decade ago, Barbara was moved by several women who were transforming health challenges into personal power, and the Breast Cancer Superhero portrait project was born. Barbara started with two questions:

1. If you were to be depicted as your superhero of choice – who would you be and why?

2. How would you want to be pictured?

The process evolved from there, culminating in large-scale portraits of women in their glory, capable of performing fantastic feats and overcoming great obstacles.

Barbara highlighted two foundational concepts to her work: “First, the universal heroes’ journey, where an ordinary person is called away from their everyday life and faced with a challenging ordeal. Second, the power of positive emotions. We hope everyone who experiences this project is reminded to celebrate the heroes in their lives — and in themselves.”

"There are many different pathways in our lives,” Barbara added. “Some we choose, and some come to us unexpectedly. We can’t erase or escape all the tough stuff, but we can plant our own flowers along the way. These women have done so, and we hope to keep encouraging others to do the same.”

Project staff are currently seeking major sponsors to purchase the original paintings to donate to hospitals or clinics.

Future plans include a diversity expansion, offerings of high-quality reproductions for sale to interested sites, and merchandise utilized as fundraisers for cancer-support organizations.

For more information, contact Barbara Porwit at info@breastcancersuperheroes.com or breastcancersuperheroes.com.

AMWA Essential Skills Certificate Course: Thoughts and Observations (Part 3: Sentence Structure)

By Adam Fix

Part 3 of the AMWA Essential Skills Certificate concerns sentence structure. If you’re thinking “Pshaw! I know how to structure a sentence!” … just wait.

1. What’s the difference between a simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence? It’s all about the clauses:

• Simple: One independent clause.

Example: “The doctor recommended antibiotics.”

• Compound: Multiple independent clauses.

Example: “The doctor recommended antibiotics, and the patient agreed.”

• Complex: One independent clause plus at least one dependent clause.

Example: “Although the doctor recommended antibiotics, the patient declined.”

• Compound-Complex: Multiple independent clauses and at least one dependent clause.

Example: “Although the doctor recommended antibiotics, the patient declined, and the patient’s wife agreed with him.”

So far, so good, right? But what about this sentence?

“The doctor said that the patient’s condition was serious.”

That is a complex sentence. The entire sentence is an independent clause, but it has a dependent clause (“that his condition was serious”) nested within it. This nested dependent clause functions as the direct object of the overarching independent clause.

Mind blown, right?

2. Watch out for faulty parallelism

Parallel construction is a wonderful way to clarify a comparison or juxtaposition of some kind. But parallelism is not without pitfalls. Consider the following:

“When choosing medications for the pregnant patient, the surgeon must not only consider the illness to be treated but also the effects on the fetus.”

What’s the problem here? As written, “consider the illness to be treated” is parallel with “the effects on the fetus.” This is incorrect because one parallel phrase has a verb but the other does not. To fix, we simply move “not only” to come AFTER “consider,” like so:

“When choosing medications for the pregnant patient, the surgeon must consider not only the illness to be treated but also the effects on the fetus.”

3. What’s the difference between loose and periodic sentences?

Loose sentences begin with an independent clause and provide additional details in subsequent clauses last. It’s “loose” because readers can relax near the end, knowing that the essential details have already been conveyed in the opening independent clause. The additional details accumulate as the sentence progresses.

Example from the guide: “I focus on four priorities that are general safety concerns: temperature of the hot tap water, lead on window sills, a functioning smoke alarm and window guards.”

Periodic sentences, by contrast, begin with the additional details and provide the independent clause last. Like a musical phrase, they follow a regular beat (hence the name) to build tension and catch the reader’s interest. At the climax, the independent clause — somewhat like a tonic chord in music — provides the essential details and resolves the tension.

Example from the guide: “In addition to performing a routine newborn assessment and discussing care issues, I conduct an assessment of the home.”

Before taking this course, I’d never heard of loose (AKA cumulative) or periodic (climactic) sentences. Definitely a useful addition to any writer’s toolbox.

Questions, comments or new additions to the newsletter? Please contact the Publications Committee Chair.