Calling all medical writers: Focus your writing with lean authoring In today’s medical writing environment, authors are routinely faced with expedited timelines to write documents about highly complex studies with overwhelming amounts of data. Reviewers are subsequently presented with complex content, with messages often hidden among unnecessary text and numbers. To ensure the important information within our documents is clear, medical writers must use lean authoring principles as standard practice. Benefits of lean authoring Lean authoring is a way of writing that removes unnecessary words and content to focus documents on key messages. Successful incorporation of lean authoring principles leads to streamlined documents that are easy to read, straightforward to interpret, and improve the overall reader experience. Benefits of implementing lean authoring principles include: 1. easily identifiable key messages; 2. reduced writing review and quality control time; and 3. increased quality.