By: Iris Uribarri

The Academic Writing Centre (AWC) was established within the institutional framework of the School of Medicine at Universidad del Salvador (Argentina) with the aim of strengthening the communicative quality of clinical research. It was conceived as a pedagogical resource integrated into the Area of Medical Education, a unit that promotes ongoing initiatives aimed at updating and optimizing teaching and learning.

To support the teaching of academic writing, the Centre offers tutoring sessions, courses, and writing workshops—both in person and online—from entry into the medical program through its completion.

Within this context, in 2015 the faculty members of the Area initiated the creation of a Writing Centre oriented to the specific characteristics of medical discourse. Our teaching experience had shown that, during the early stages of conceptual exploration, dialogic tutoring was irreplaceable. By contrast, in the production of highly standardized texts—such as posters, abstracts, theses, and research articles—typical of the advanced undergraduate and graduate stages, it became essential that the conventions that govern disciplinary writing are made explicit.

At present, the Centre provides more than one hundred documents designed to support writing in established academic genres, including the clinical case report, the literature review, the meta-analysis, abstracts, clinical algorithms, comparative studies, and original research articles. To achieve this objective, we set out to translate implicit rhetorical conventions into explicit operational guidelines—for example, for drafting different types of abstracts. The aim was to enable conceptually sound texts to achieve an appropriate discursive realization.

These documents function as reference tools intended for advanced students, faculty members, and researchers. A central concern in their development was to ensure both ease of reading and accessibility of comprehension. They were conceived as a collection of documents sharing a canonical macrostructure. Each document addresses a specific writing issue and the discursive decisions it entails, such as the definition of the genre, its communicative purpose, the conditions under which it circulates, and its structural components.

Information is organized into autonomous sections, with a predominance of brief definitions, bullet points, and subtitles, allowing readers to resolve specific questions through selective consultation rather than through continuous, linear reading. Each document includes sections such as “Frequently Asked Questions” and “Recommendations.” This flexibility allows consultation to take place before, during, or after the writing process. Learners access the guides online through a dedicated platform.

The guides do not explain what science is, nor do they provide metalinguistic reflections, theoretical justifications, or appeals to authoritative citations. They do not replace methodological training, the critical reading of research articles, or research experience. Their function is to transform tacit conventions—often acquired through imitation (vicarious learning)—into conscious writing decisions, for example, deciding whether the abstract should be structured, unstructured, or informative.

The reader of the AWC guides is conceived as a potential or actual member of the academic community who must communicate through a shared technical register. In this sense, the documents provide situated, rhetorical, and procedural knowledge that can be transferred directly into practice.

The distinctive feature of this body of documents is the detailed explicitation of the conventions governing the composition of scientific genres in the medical literature. In particular, they highlight key differences between textual types that may share similar structures but serve different communicative purposes—differences that often go unnoticed by learners. A frequent example can be observed in the writing of the Introduction, the opening section of both the clinical case report and the original research article. Whereas the former foregrounds the singularity of a specific case, the latter constructs generalizable knowledge.

This difference in purpose entails substantive variations in writing. In a clinical case report, the Introduction must be brief and focused, serving an expository function of a justificatory nature. In an original research article, by contrast, it is longer and more graduated in structure and fulfills an explanatory and delimiting expository function. These differences affect not only the length of the section but also the type of data required according to the genre.

In our experience, when these writing-related aspects become visible, writing ceases to be a diffuse obstacle and becomes an addressable problem, thereby contributing to the stabilization of disciplinary discourse practices.

Specialized writing in the biomedical field fulfills an essential function in the production, circulation, and validation of knowledge, insofar as it ensures the replicability of its content. The precision to which it is bound reduces interpretive ambiguity and facilitates appropriate communication in the description of clinical reality.

Within this framework, our commitment through the AWC is to support the rhetorical learning required of authors, understanding that the appropriation of medical discourse constitutes, at the same time, an epistemological and ethical competence for the exercise of responsible professional practice.

Iris Uribarri


Professor Emerita, School of Medicine, Universidad del Salvador (Argentina).
Author of the materials and responsible for the conceptual framework of the Academic Writing Centre (AWC) in the area of disciplinary writing in Medicine.

Institutional Affiliation

The Academic Writing Centre (AWC) operates within the Area of Medical Education, coordinated by the academic María del Huerto Jaunarena. Staff: Lic. Catalina Garat Lic. Delfina Nougués Lic. Claudia Martínez Lic. Estela Oanes