About Lee | Medical Writing & AI Guidance

I began to study Japanese as a college student at Waseda University. There, I fell in love with the Japanese language and culture. But although most of my friends studied literature and philosophy, I studied science. I was fascinated by Japanese research, and I sympathized with the researchers who wanted to present their work to the world but struggled with English.

After university I began working as a translator and progressed to the translation of medical documents into English. Soon I was helping Japanese authors with their own English writing. Most of them thought in complex Japanese as they wrote, so their English became complicated, too — sometimes so complicated that even the authors themselves could not understand it. I began to teach how to write clear, simple English. When the authors could understand their own writing, their readers could understand it, too. That was the beginning of my thinking about the 3Cs: clear, concise, coherent.

For over 30 years I have worked with Japanese scientists and medical writers. I have watched language tools evolve, from the earliest machine translation to today's large language models. I see AI as an extension of the dictionaries, grammar checkers, and translation software that came before, but on a completely different level. We are at an inflection point, and the writers I work with can either be overwhelmed by this change or learn to use it well.

So alongside the 3Cs, I now teach writers to use AI as a partner: how to write effective prompts, how to push back when the output doesn't sound right, how to check the AI's work, and how not to trust fluent English too quickly. The goal is not to let AI do the writer's thinking. It is to use AI to make medical English easier to examine, shape, and finalize responsibly — so the writer stays in control of the scientific meaning.