OET Writing: The Right Way To List Out Medications

Lists are one of the best ways to communicate a variety of information. They are handy when the organisation and to-the-point delivery of information is necessary. In the writing sub-test of OET, lists are often employed to describe the patient’s medication.

Often students are unaware of how medications can be listed in OET Writing. We have come to your rescue. Here is a guideline to help you list medications.

Let’s have a look at how to perfect our usage of lists with the mastery of SEMICOLONS.

The perfect list

When the items or the information that you have to convey are simple, you can simply write them down separating them with the help of commas.

For example:“He takes aspirin, lisinopril, and atorvastatin”

This is a clear sentence and is easy to comprehend as there are commas that tell us the various medications the patient is under.

However, with the rise in the complexity of the information to present, the difficulty to comprehend them also goes up.

For instance, “He takes aspirin, 100mg with his evening meal, lisinopril, 10 mg and atorvastatin, 20 mg both once a day”

You can clearly see that the individual drugs no longer stand out as they did in the first example. This compromises the clarity of the sentence and will make it much harder for the reader to get the gist of the medication at first glance.

So how do we tackle this?

It is rather simple. Just swap out the commas after the description of the drugs!
so the second example after modification becomes

“He takes aspirin, 100mg with his evening meal; lisinopril, 10 mg, and atorvastatin, 20mg both once a day. “

As easy as that.

Happy Scoring!