One of the occupational hazards of being a medical editor is the inevitability of occasionally working on a highly technical, highly detailed manuscript on a topic about which you know nothing. You don’t need to have a medical degree to be a medical editor, but how do you edit a paper when you’re not sure whether the item under discussion should treated as a plural, or even as a noun?

Of course, an excellent place to start is the AMA Manual of Style, which can provide a general overview sufficient to navigate the complexities of many topics.

For example, you don’t need to know much about respiratory physiology as long as you remember to check section 15.16 (Pulmonary, Respiratory, and Blood Gas Terminology). You’ll be sprinkling cryptoglyphs like V̇, Pb, and v̅ in no time!

You also don’t need to know how to conduct an F test to know that when you see an F score, it should also include the numerator and denominator of the degrees of freedom in subscript (section 20.9, Glossary of Statistical Terms).

In addition to the searchable AMA Manual of Style, the modern age has also bestowed the gift of internet search engines to help decrypt topics of which you may have no knowledge (and had never previously needed knowledge of, for that matter). If you find yourself looking at a topic you’ve never heard of and the Manual doesn’t cover it, a few minutes perusing sites such as Google, PubMed, and Wikipedia can give you tentative grounds on which to make your stand.

But sometimes even all the treasures of the internet and your trusty AMA Manual of Style combined can’t help and you’re adrift on a sea of statistics, biochemistry, gene expression, or whatever your topical Achilles heel may be.

In such cases, it can be useful to think of a sentence like a math equation—you don’t need to know what the subject means, but if you can look at a sentence and know where the subject is, where the object is, and what kind of verb tense you need, you’re more than halfway there.

And, as always, you can and should rely on the author to clarify and correct as needed. The ultimate goal of your work is to improve the author’s work, and that can only be truly accomplished through teamwork.–Rebecca Palmer