Before the Client Mark-Up: A Pre-Review Dry Run for UK MedComms Drafts

Client review is rarely the place to discover that a sentence can be read two ways. By the time a draft reaches a pharmaceutical client’s medical, regulatory and commercial reviewers, every avoidable ambiguity costs calendar time and, often, goodwill. A short pre-client test — a red pen rehearsal — can reduce that risk without adding another formal review layer.

A rehearsal, not another review

At its simplest, the rehearsal asks two or three colleagues who have not seen the draft to read it cold, against a one-page brief, and answer a fixed set of questions under time pressure. The output is not a polished rewrite. It is a set of observations about where the copy fails to land.

It is not a line edit, not a medical approval and not a substitute for the formal review and sign-off required under the ABPI Code or the client’s own procedures. Its purpose is diagnostic: to find clarity, compliance and tone problems before the client marks them up. Keeping that distinction clear matters, because a rehearsal that drifts into approval becomes a shadow sign-off process and slows everyone down.

Selecting readers who can see the wood

Choose for distance, not seniority. The best readers are close enough to the audience to recognise a false note, but far enough from the draft to meet it fresh. A practical mix is one colleague who knows the audience or therapy area but has not worked on the project, one writer or editor from another account, and one person with review or compliance awareness who is not the nominated signatory.

Avoid inviting the author, the account lead who commissioned the draft and anyone who has already shaped the client brief. Their presence can turn a diagnostic session into a negotiation about intent. If a senior colleague must attend, ask them to observe and hold comments until the capture stage.

Two or three readers is usually enough. More than that and the session becomes a committee; the notes multiply, the patterns become harder to see and the author spends longer adjudicating feedback than revising. Brief readers on confidentiality and keep the session internal.

The one-page brief that keeps it a rehearsal

Give readers a single page containing the intended audience, channel, desired action, mandatory messages and any known client sensitivities. Add the three questions you most want answered. Do not include the author’s rationale or a defence of the draft. Reviewers need to meet the copy as the audience will, not as the author wishes it were read.

Ask readers to mark the page with a red pen as they go: first impression, points of confusion, possible compliance flags and places where the tone shifts. Ten minutes of silent reading is usually enough for a two-page draft. Longer documents need a sampling plan, such as the opening spread, one clinical section and the call to action.

A 45-minute format

A workable format is five minutes for the brief, ten for silent reading, fifteen for structured questions and ten for discussing the top three issues. The final five minutes are for the scribe to read back what has been captured. Use a timer. The constraint is the point: it keeps the conversation on diagnosis rather than rewriting.

The author should listen rather than explain. If a reader has misread the draft, that is data, not a failure. Capture the reader’s exact words where possible, because paraphrase loses the signal. A note that says the second paragraph feels like a leaflet, not a letter, is more useful than a general comment about tone.

Questions that produce useful notes

Keep the questions fixed across sessions so that notes remain comparable. Useful prompts include: what is the one action you would take after reading this? Where did you slow down or reread? Which phrase would you expect a compliance reviewer to query? What claim lacks a visible source or qualifier? Where does the tone shift? What might a patient or healthcare professional misread? Ask each reader for their top three issues only; a long list tends to bury the pattern.

Compliance questions should be framed as flags, not verdicts. A reader can say that a comparative claim feels unsupported or that a mandatory statement seems detached from the claim it qualifies. They should not be asked to approve the wording. That remains the job of the formal medical and regulatory review.

From notes to a cleaner client-ready version

Triage the notes into clarity, compliance and tone. Look for repetition across readers: one reader’s quirk is an opinion; three readers pausing at the same sentence is a pattern. Fix structure before sentences. If readers cannot find the call to action, moving it is more valuable than polishing the paragraph around it.

Resist the temptation to sand down every idiosyncrasy. The author’s voice is part of the client’s brand, and a draft that has been over-rehearsed can sound like every other document in the category. Read the revised draft aloud. Keep the characteristic phrasing that still works and revise only where the rehearsal exposed a genuine risk.

Keep a short rehearsal log: issue, decision and rationale. If a note touches a clinical claim or a mandatory statement, route it to medical or regulatory rather than resolving it in the room. Do not send raw rehearsal notes to the client. A concise line in the covering email is usually enough: the draft was tested with cold readers and revised for clarity in the sections that caused hesitation.

Pitfalls to avoid

The common failures are predictable. Inviting too many readers, scheduling the session too late, omitting the brief, allowing a senior reviewer to dominate, failing to capture the notes and then ignoring them — or accepting every note and losing the author’s voice. Another is treating the rehearsal as a substitute for formal review. If the conversation starts to sound like approval, stop and route the draft to the proper review channel.

Making it a habit

Put a 45-minute slot in the project plan roughly 48 hours before the internal quality assurance deadline. Keep the one-page brief in the project folder and rotate readers so that no single colleague becomes a bottleneck. Over time, the rehearsal log becomes a useful record of recurring issues, from qualifier placement to unexplained abbreviations.

The aim is not to produce a perfect draft before the client sees it. It is to remove the avoidable friction that turns a first review into a scavenger hunt. A short, disciplined dry run gives the author a cleaner version to defend, the client a clearer document to review and the project a better chance of keeping its timeline.