The communication of new medical procedures is a common hurdle faced by the medical field. Terminology can obscure the basic procedures and dense vocabulary at break-neck speed can confuse the general public. These features of the Official Style deserve criticism. However, certain circumstances call for this precision and restrictions of language. I will be exploring how the Official Style can be useful by critiquing the writing of a system's proposal for the newly developed Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation (EPR) developed at the University of Baltimore, with the research and implementation of the system being led by Dr. Samuel A. Tisherman. In the paper “Development of the emergency preservation and resuscitation for cardiac arrest from trauma clinical trial”, Tisherman and his colleagues describe to administrators and other medical professionals how the experimental EPR system will be implemented for use by emergency services like trauma surgeons EMTs and military combat medics.
While
the remnants of the Official Style are present in this paper, the remaining
rhetorical features appear to serve only as a means of keeping tonal evenness
with the technical aspects. One aspect that is often criticized of the Official
Style is the consistent use of technical information or round-about language
used to describe the subject of communication. However, I believe that the
context of this paper requires a certain amount of distance and precision of
language. This can most accurately be seen in the introductory paragraphs when
the reader is presented with two details:
- Medicine’s
current cardiovascular procedures are time-consuming and often fatal.
- Historical precedent has been set and
should be recognized as an area medicine should improve.
The emotion and dire
straits are clear: “People are dying from excessive bleeding and the medicine
does not have a solution; lives are being lost but we have a highly certain
solution that should be tested”. When a possible solution to a problem is
presented, emotions could obscure flaws or shortcuts in the procedure; the
emotion and personal connection that helped drive the production of a new
life-saving system can be the same emotion that will be called into question
when the procedure is proposed to veterans of the trade. The medical field is
an especially methodical field when it comes to implementing new ideas. It
appears that the team writing this proposal has considered the emotional
balancing act of both public communication and medicine. To mitigate the
emotional stakes of the proposal, the doctors deliberately wrote about the fundamental shortfalls of the modern surgical doctrine and the casualties of
Vietnam (pg. 803). Though it is presented in a quantitative state, the allusion
to the events and casualties of the Vietnam War adds a neutral layer of ethos
to the piece that would make the most skeptical administrator take another look
at this proposal. While it may seem callous for medical professionals to
manipulate language, it is appropriate for their station in the medical community.
These doctors need to present themselves as levelheaded and through as the
board of directors or contemporaries they serve with if this new technology is
to be implemented. I would count this stylistic move so early in the paper as
an ultimately successful, as the system has successfully been used on a patient
in late 2019 and will most likely be seeing large-scale implementation in the
near future.
Technical knowledge can also unintentionally obscure information
from the general public. This can be seen at a base level with the use nearly
archaic medical terms such as “exsanguinating” in place of “heavy external
bleeding”. You could also point to the Laboratory Studies section on pages
803-804, with a dense and technically eloquent explanation of the methods used
to prove the concept of EPR. While I am not in the medical field, I would only
assume that the complex functions of the human body require a deep
understanding to properly navigate. With the nature of a newly devised centered
around the cardiovascular system, accuracy must be used to properly convey the
procedure to the medically literate audience. I believe that this stylistic
choice is mirrored in later sections of the proceeding sections of this paper,
including the sections for FDA approval, Conflicts of interest, Institutional
Review (pg. 805), Community Consultation, Data Security and Training Lessons
(pg. 806). These sections were written not for the benefit of the doctors
reviewing the procedure, but for administrators questioning the legitimacy and
political safety of EPR. There are some telltale signs of the style, such as
removing the first person form a paragraph (FDA Section, pg.805) and the noun
substitution used to change the perspective of study participants
(Institutional Review, pg. 805).
The technical framework of the Official Style
is not without its faults. In the Community Connections section, it is stated
that it “may be difficult to reach (them) during the community consultation and
public disclosure process” (pg. 806). This quote only functions to define an
obstacle for administrators and public officials to take care of without
providing a solution. I believe this is an instance where the Official Style
does begin to obscure the real message of the writing. I have not done a bunch
of research, but I would assume that the difficulties would be centered around
a patient’s fear of being a failed iteration of an experiment, especially with
an untested system such as EPR. While
the mentioning of African American men is a relevant detail (since this is
being implemented by the University of Baltimore), the vague nature of
“communication difficulties” is suspect and should be defined more clearly.
The task of translating years of clinical practice
and medical knowledge would be difficult for anyone. However, I believe that
Dr. Tisherman and his colleges have used technical language and the Official
Style to find a happy medium between the dense language of science and the
general public’s minimal medical knowledge. It would be foolish to approach
stylistic critique without considering the difficult situations writers are
often found in. If this were released to
the general public in a press release or as part of the mentioned community
outreach, the sideways eloquence and unnecessary medical vocabulary would
confuse the public as to the nature of EPR. However, the rhetorical situation
and stylistic context of this paper are clearly designed as a proposal for the
medical community and administrators concerned with the details and methods of
the procedure. This would also be a primary source of information for
journalists looking to translate the paper into a more digestible format for
the public. I believe that the partitioning of the technical and obscure from
the systems and public-oriented writing of the paper is an appropriate use of
the Official Style with a few minor hiccups that should be addressed.
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