As you know, business people are busy. Often, our job is to write messages that are highly readable and accessible, so that our readers can understand our messages as quickly and easily as possible.
In this exercise, you will work to edit a piece of writing to make it easier for fast reading. Your challenge: Reduce this message by at least 50% while still conveying the meaning. Then copy and paste your version into a discussion forum post.
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It will help to:
Vary sentence length
Keep paragraphs short (125 words or fewer)
Focus on one concept per paragraph
Place key ideas at the beginning
Use lists, headings and subheadings for fast reading.
Eliminate redundant words and phrases
The Article is:
Ethics, Empathy, and Leadership
Ethics, Empathy, and Leadership
I was recently meeting with some fourth-year residents as part of their course on community psychiatry.
Since this was an introductory session, we were focusing on the role of the community psychiatrist.
We thought about this within both the constraints that many psychiatrists practicing in the community
find themselves, and the ideal characteristics and defining features of community psychiatry. Even
as trainees, these folks could see how the scope of what they were being asked to do was shaped
by financial imperatives and was often limited to biologic perspectives on illness management. They
clearly felt discouraged by the limitations on their abilities to practice and learn the more dynamic
and humanistic aspects of psychiatry, and wondered whether there was any way around this. Their
perceptions and experiences were closely aligned with the discussions generated at our winter
meeting in March. (The draft report from that meeting can be viewed on our website, or specifically
here.) And it was not surprising to discover that their exposure to the transformation initiatives that are
currently underway and recovery-focused practice were quite limited, even as they prepared for life
after residency. This made for an interesting discussion, in any case, that was rather thought provoking.
How does one try to convey the essence of community psychiatry in thirty or forty minutes, which was
all that remained of the session after the preliminary part of our discussion? In response to one of the
resident’s questions, I began to think about what makes community psychiatry community psychiatry.
He talked about his clinical rotation, in which he saw public-sector clients in a community mental