Writing skills for nursing students, Nursing Standard

Author : em-admin

Posted : 26 / 05 / 10

As the adage goes, anything worth having is worth fighting for. But it can be a rude awakening if you’ve signed onto a nursing degree course and now find your passion for helping people buried under a pile of essays and assignments.

There’s no doubt that a degree is great preparation for the challenging career you have ahead of you. But turning complex scientific information into concise writing is not always easy. It can seem like a losing battle – especially if you haven’t been shown how.

The secret is to learn how to communicate your ideas and arguments clearly. This can boost your understanding of the clinical material, enabling you to put your people know-how into context.

Here are five ways to lay the foundations for writing success.

Clarify your main message

Before you begin writing, it’s vital that you know what you really want to say. Answering the questions: What?, Where?, When?, How?, Why? and Who? can help you to organise your ideas.

Focus on your reader

Your reader is likely to be your university lecturer, who should already be very knowledgeable about the topics you write about.

So focus on exactly what they need for each particular assignment. For instance, if your task is to evaluate a variety of health-promotion models, focus on what is most important about each model and write about that first. This will show that you are able to reach a clear conclusion from your research. You can then demonstrate your evaluation skills by expanding on each of your key messages.

Keep it short and sweet

A survey by Harvard professor D.H. Menzel showed that in technical papers, people find sentences difficult to understand when they are longer than 34 words. So make things easier for your reader by keeping your sentences between 15 and 20 words.

One idea, one sentence

Consider this sentence:

‘Nurses play an important role in the delivery of healthcare yet some are concerned that they need more autonomy in their work.’

This actually contains two separate (but linked) ideas, so it would be more helpful to the reader to split the sentence up:

’Nurses play an important role in the delivery of healthcare. Yet some experts are concerned that they need more autonomy in their work.’

Splitting up your ideas in this way will give your writing clarity.

Use the active voice

Traditionally, academic writing uses the passive voice to appear objective and scientific. But the active voice adds movement to your writing and it’s still scientifically sound. So instead of writing ‘Leadership styles have been investigated by Zane and Prestipino (2004)’, write ‘Zane and Prestipino (2004) investigated leadership styles’.

Academic writing doesn’t have to be stilted, wordy and difficult to decipher. Practise these techniques and your writing will demonstrate your passion for nursing.

Next month, we’ll look at the ins and outs of essay writing. We’ll also give you some top tips for breaking writers’ block.

Robert Ashton is Chief Executive of Emphasis.

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