Welcome FIU School of Medicine faculty members!

The Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine is providing a small group of faculty members this fall with a writing coach to help you meet the new requirement to submit an article by the end of March 2026. It was my pleasure to coach all nine of last year’s cohort, and I’m happy to say that everyone developed and submitted an article. Each person in this year’s cohort of doctors will be working either with me or with my wonderful colleague Kate Daloz. We’re here to help you develop a writing process that works for you and support you as you develop ideas, pick a journal, organize, and edit your article. Each participant has eight writing coaching sessions to use this fall and next spring. Your coach will reach out to you to schedule a first Zoom session in early September.

The material below provides more information about your coaches and a fuller explanation of how academic writing coaching works. If you keep scrolling down, you’ll also see slides from last year’s presentations on the writing process, crafting introductions and discussion sections, and peer review. Please feel free to download them; you and your coach may be talking about some of the information they contain. At the bottom of this page are sample medical articles of the various types clinical faculty often write (from case reports to literature reviews and perspective pieces), and a few other resources.

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A Bit About Your Coaches
      I, Amy Benson Brown, have worked with over a hundred faculty members across the disciplines in the last two decades to help them develop and publish their work. I’m curious to learn about your writing process and to help you make it more effective. I’m also the author of a monograph about literature and a book of poems.
      My colleague Kate Daloz is also a writer and an educator with over twenty years experience working with other writers, from novelists to neuroscientists. Most recently, she developed and directed a new PhD writing support program for Columbia University. Her second nonfiction book is forthcoming from Knopf in 2026.

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What Happens in Coaching Sessions
You may well be wondering, what really is academic writing coaching, anyway? Coaching often blends conversation about the substance and style of your writing with discussion of common writing process issues (like making time to write and dealing with anxiety or writer’s block).       

First Kate or I will email you to set up a session over Zoom in early September. Everyone will likely meet with their coach once a month or so through March. We can look at particular journals with you to see their requirements and guidelines. Together, we can also analyze recent articles of the type you are writing that have been published recently in the journal you are targeting. Writers may bring an outline or part of a draft to a session, and we can further develop and edit it together during that time. We’ll also talk over practical matters like communicating with journal editors and navigating peer review. Basically, each of these sessions can be tailored to fit what you need at that moment to advance your writing project. We will aim to have 5 meetings this fall and 3 in the spring term before by the end of March.