Many of you have asked me how someone’s career can evolve to marry medicine and editing and writing. The story actually begins with learning to read. My father’s sister, a frequent visitor in our home, was a first grade teacher who began teaching me to read when I was 3 years old. As a journalism major and later as a career journalist, my mother was chief proofreader and critic of any school writing project. But all that changed when I was 14 years old, and my mother, tiring of typing our school essays, enrolled my brother and me in a summer secretarial school typing class where I learned to touch type without looking at my fingers on the keyboard. At the time I had no idea how important this skill would become. In later years, I often jokingly told my mother that the “best thing she ever did for me was to enroll me in the secretarial typing class.” Although typing is not writing, this skill started to pay off in high school when I wrote for the school newspaper and literary magazine, and found that typing efficiency could lead to better writing and more effective self-editing. My mother continued to encourage me to write both literary and academic essays, and I found great satisfaction in doing so.
I became an editor during my freshman year in college by accident.
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— Joseph S. Alpert, MD
This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of The American Journal of Medicine.
