The third edition of Writing for the Health Professions helps develop critical thinking skills for the undergraduate research audience, especially those students in pre-professional programs. In the writing chapters, the textbook provides more robust examples of how to think about language for clarity, and it also focuses on how to think critically about the structures of language and how these structures produce meaningful action for unity, coherence, and control. In the research chapters, the third edition shows its audience how to read research and then organize the evidence for a literature review. These changes demonstrate how to analyze and evaluate research and then synthesize and correlate the evidence into a focused discussion with student examples. It also provides some practical skills to organize information into a matrix to produce more focused thinking and writing. The third edition also demonstrates how to think about an evidence base and how medical decisions depend on varying factors: provider experience, patient wants, and research. The new chapters discuss different types of research and how the different layers of quality associated with each type contribute to the evidence base. The evidence base is thus defined as different levels of quality that build consistencies and trends in the science across time. Therefore, these chapters highlight the importance of analyzing and evaluating research for its validity and reliability to define the different layers of quality. In a world in which information literacy is critical, this textbook intends to provide readers with higher-level thinking skills to evaluate research and to contextualize research in medical decisions.
