Asking the Right Questions: Developing Better Discovery Skills

This article was originally published in the AMWA Journal.

All of us have suffered the consequences of expensive, unasked questions in both our professional lives and our personal lives. As medical communicators, we must ask good questions to elicit information, but many of us lack adequate training in this skill. Add to that the natural reticence of some medical communicators, and it is no wonder that we walk away from interviews with subject matter experts or client meetings wishing we had remembered to ask X, Y, or Z. This article offers information as to why questions are so important, what types of questions are useful, how to strategize your questions, how to handle people answering the questions you ask them, and how to answer questions that others ask you.