Improving health literacy is critical to ensuring that everyone has the information they need to make informed decisions about their care. To do this, the information must be clear enough for patients and their families to understand and apply it to the situation at hand. While strides have been made to achieve this goal using plain language, there is more that can be done. Documentation will have a greater impact on its audience if it takes into consideration their preferences for learning, their situation, and the types of information that they have to process. For example, with a cancer diagnosis there are a multitude of terms and concepts to learn in a short amount of time in circumstances that are, to say the least, chaotic and very personal. When the stakes are so high, it is critical that, as technical communicators, we get it right.
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