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PubMedDate not supplied

An evaluation of college and low-income youth writing together: self-discovery and cultural connection.

Although the health and healing effects of writing have been documented in the literature, most of the studies have focused primarily on individuals writing alone. This formative evaluation is a component of an intervention reported elsewhere. The evaluation describes the experience of low-income youth and college students (n = 7) writing in a group during a 10-week workshop. The results revealed the development of protective processes of self-esteem, self-efficacy, coping strategies, social support, and cultural connections. In the weekly 2-hr writing sessions, using the Amherst Writers and Artists method, participants were encouraged to write their stories in their own voices in response to prompts, followed by reading aloud and positive feedback. At the end of the 10 weeks participants were interviewed about their experience within the group and outside the group. Analysis of interviews revealed two themes that emerged from the experience of writing together: connection to self through feelings, reflection, and behaviors; and connection to others through learning and empathy. The results suggest that writing in a group using a specific approach facilitated emotional catharsis, increased self knowledge, coping strategies, and understanding and appreciating of others.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

Psychosocial benefits of solitary reminiscence writing: an exploratory study.

Claims have been made that reminiscence has benefits for older people's psychological well-being, and that writing memories may be a therapeutic process. This paper describes an exploratory study in which five nursing home residents engaged in a process of writing their memories by themselves, in a series of booklets containing memory prompts and photographs, over a period of four weeks. Each completed booklet was typed up by researchers and returned to participants the following week, with a bound copy provided to participants at the end of the study period. Analysis focuses on two sets of data: an in-depth case study of one participant, and a thematic analysis of field notes, researcher reflections, and the written material produced by the other study participants. The case study revealed three main themes: views on the past; sharing the past; and confidence in writing about the past. The field note analysis indicated the presence of four themes: proof and maintenance of skills; psychological or internal processes; social contact; and pleasure in reminiscence. The writing was seen as cathartic and provided a meaningful purpose, an opportunity to exercise writing skills and memory, and a focus for participants to share key stories with others. This exploratory study suggests that there is potential in using solitary writing within a reminiscence framework to improve psychological well-being in older people. However, caution should be exercised when encouraging older people to write their stories. Issues of confidentiality, audience, support, and appropriateness of the activity for the individual need consideration.

Aged↗

PubMed2005

Character complexity and redundancy in writing systems over human history.

A writing system is a visual notation system wherein a repertoire of marks, or strokes, is used to build a repertoire of characters. Are there any commonalities across writing systems concerning the rules governing how strokes combine into characters; commonalities that might help us identify selection pressures on the development of written language? In an effort to answer this question we examined how strokes combine to make characters in more than 100 writing systems over human history, ranging from about 10 to 200 characters,and including numerals, abjads, abugidas, alphabets and syllabaries from five major taxa: Ancient Near-Eastern, European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Southeast Asian. We discovered underlying similarities in two fundamental respects. (i) The number of strokes per characters is approximately three, independent of the number of characters in the writing system; numeral systems are the exception, having on average only two strokes per character. (ii) Characters are ca. 50% redundant, independent of writing system size; intuitively, this means that acharacter's identity can be determined even when half of its strokes are removed. Because writing systems are under selective pressure to have characters that are easy for the visual system to recognize and for the motor system to write, these fundamental commonalities may be a fingerprint of mechanisms underlying the visuo-motor system.

Form Perception↗

PubMed2005

Manuscript Architect: a Web application for scientific writing in virtual interdisciplinary groups.

BACKGROUND: Although scientific writing plays a central role in the communication of clinical research findings and consumes a significant amount of time from clinical researchers, few Web applications have been designed to systematically improve the writing process. This application had as its main objective the separation of the multiple tasks associated with scientific writing into smaller components. It was also aimed at providing a mechanism where sections of the manuscript (text blocks) could be assigned to different specialists. Manuscript Architect was built using Java language in conjunction with the classic lifecycle development method. The interface was designed for simplicity and economy of movements. Manuscripts are divided into multiple text blocks that can be assigned to different co-authors by the first author. Each text block contains notes to guide co-authors regarding the central focus of each text block, previous examples, and an additional field for translation when the initial text is written in a language different from the one used by the target journal. Usability was evaluated using formal usability tests and field observations. RESULTS: The application presented excellent usability and integration with the regular writing habits of experienced researchers. Workshops were developed to train novice researchers, presenting an accelerated learning curve. The application has been used in over 20 different scientific articles and grant proposals. CONCLUSION: The current version of Manuscript Architect has proven to be very useful in the writing of multiple scientific texts, suggesting that virtual writing by interdisciplinary groups is an effective manner of scientific writing when interdisciplinary work is required.

Authorship↗

PubMed2001

Effects of future writing and optimism on health behaviors in HIV-infected women.

Optimists (people who have positive expectations about the future) have been shown to perform more health-promoting behaviors than pessimists. This study attempts to alter individuals' levels of optimism, and thereby their health behaviors, by having them write about a positive future. HIV-infected women (N = 40) on combination therapies were randomly assigned to write about a positive future or assigned to a no-writing control group. Among participants who were low in optimism, the writing intervention led to increased optimism, a trend toward increased self-reported adherence to medications, and decreased distress from medication side effects, compared to controls who did not write. Participants who were high in optimism showed the opposite effects after writing about the future. Results suggest that a future-oriented writing intervention may be apromising technique to increase medication adherence and decrease symptom distress in pessimistic individuals.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Writing-skills development in the health professions.

BACKGROUND: Studies have found that students in the medical professions often lack the writing skills required during their education and career. One contributing factor to this deficiency is that writing tends to be discipline specific, rather than requiring general skills acquired in undergraduate schools. PURPOSE: To determine the extent to which a rigorous writing exercise impacted the quality of students' medical writing based on a specified rubric. METHOD: In the context of a basic science course, we developed 6 weekly writing exercises called Question of the Week, along with a rubric for scoring students' work. The rubric evaluated 6 specific aspects of students' writing including Comprehensiveness/Thoroughness, Accuracy, Conciseness, Logical Organization, Justification of Assertions, and Use of Appropriate Terminology. RESULTS: Except for Justification of Assertions and Accuracy, which did not change, scores for all categories improved between Weeks 1 and 2. Use of Appropriate Terminology was the only category for which scores increased after Week 2. CONCLUSION: The clearest indication of writing development came from students' augmented ability to use medical terminology in appropriate ways. This is an important observation, given that each Question of the Week covered a separate body system, characterized by distinctly different terms and jargon. We concluded that students need much more practice to attain the level of proficiency outlined by our rubric.

Educational Measurement↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The write time.

For nurse leaders, professional writing is essential for career development. Writing, especially writing for publication in a peer-reviewed professional journal, establishes you as a qualified and respected authority in your field and increases your reputation both within and outside your agency. As well, professional writing by nurse leaders contributes to the advancement of the nursing discipline and provides a service to the public. Even more importantly, professional writing can be a stimulating, challenging, creative outlet and allow for personal growth and development. Many nurse leaders, however, find writing a time-consuming and, sometimes, difficult chore, and procrastinate. This article provides some timely tips to help you focus more effectively on professional writing.

Career Mobility↗

PubMed2005

On psychoanalytic writing.

Analytic writing constitutes a literary genre of its own. It involves the linking of an analytic idea (developed in a scholarly manner) with an analytic experience created in the medium of language. What makes this literary genre so demanding is that experience--including analytic experience--does not come to us in words. This fact generates a paradox that lies at the core of analytic writing: analytic experience (which cannot be said or written) must be transformed into 'fiction' (an imaginative rendering of experience in words) in order to convey to the reader something of what is true to the emotional experience that the analyst had with the patient. The author discusses a clinical passage from one of his recently published papers in an effort to demonstrate some of the conscious and unconscious thinking that goes into his writing. He then looks closely at the way the language works in a successful piece of theoretical analytic writing. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of facets of the author s experience with analytic writing including the psychological 'state of writing', which is at once a meditation and a wrestling match with language; experimenting with the form (structure) of an analytic essay; and the question of originality in analytic writing.

Humans↗

PubMed2005

Diagnosing children's writing disabilities: different tests give different results.

Writing problems are common in children with clinical disorders. However, there are significant intra-individual differences between the ability to spell words, construct sentences, and compose text. Therefore, achievement tests measuring different writing skills may not be consistent in identifying children who have these various writing disabilities. Our study compared scores on the Woodcock-Johnson Written Language subtests (which measure the ability to produce single words and single sentences) with scores on the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test Written Expression subtest (which assesses compositional writing skills) in 54 children referred by their teachers to a school psychologist for writing problems. The Woodcock-Johnson only identified 35% of children as having significant writing problems, whereas the Wechsler test identified 78%. Our study suggests that the latter is more likely than the Woodcock-Johnson to identify students who have problems in compositional writing.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1995

The effect of repeated writing on memory.

Repeated writing, or rehearsal by writing, is a common memory strategy for the Japanese, especially when learning new logographic characters. The to-be-remembered items are written down not as external prompts, as with reminder notes, but to be memorized in the course of writing them down over and over again. In this study, we investigated whether the strategy was effective, and if so, in which condition. Experiment 1 showed that repeated writing improved memory for graphic designs but not for Chinese characters, words, or syllables. Experiment 2 showed that the effect occurred for both Japanese and American subjects, suggesting that it was not the result of a cultural background associated with a logographic language. Instead, the effect seemed to be accounted for by the encoding specificity of visual-motor information, because repeated writing improved free recall--that included writing--but did not improve recognition (Experiment 3). In Experiment 4, the strategy was applied to learning the Arabic alphabet. Finally, similarities between repeated writing and Type 1 rehearsal are discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

The composing processes of nursing students in writing nurses' notes.

In this exploratory research, a microethnographic approach was used to investigate how nursing students learn to write nurses' notes. The research focused on the perceptions and behaviors of first-year nursing students as they learned to write nurses' notes in the classroom, campus lab, and hospital. Aspects of the environment were identified that facilitated or hindered the process of learning to write nurses' notes. Adoption of a mental organizing framework by the students appeared to facilitate the composing process. The use of a standard flow sheet appeared to hinder the writing-to-learn and writing-to-remember aspects of the composition of nurses' notes. Students were aware of a hostile audience for their nurses' notes--a court of law. The study provides important information on the assessment and decision-making processes that students use in learning to write nurses' notes, as well as the various environmental influences that must be considered in on-the-job writing. Findings suggest that nurses and educators should consider how to restructure the learning environment to facilitate composition of effective nurses' notes.

Decision Making↗

PubMed2002

Writing a book proposal: using a question approach.

Most of the work of writing a book comes in the preparation of the book proposal. The process helps you carefully think through answers to several tough questions. Resources like Larsen's (1997) book, How to Write a Book Proposal, can also be a helpful guideline as you write your proposal. By the time you finish the proposal, you will be very excited about the content and prospects for the book. This is good, because when you get that acceptance, you will have to maintain your enthusiasm for the year or so you spend writing the manuscript. During the year you are writing, you will probably let some activities of daily living (ADLs) slide. After you submit the manuscript, it could take months to get your life back in order. You will start to wonder how you ever found time to write a book. You may even swear you will never write another one. Then one day, the muses will give you an idea for another book proposal.

Books↗

PubMed1989

Practical approaches to scientific writing.

Scientific writings represent final products of scientific endeavors. A scientist communicates with others by his or her writings and oral presentations. In most universities, there are no formal courses on scientific writing and presentation. Students learn mostly by trial and error or by individual apprenticeship. This brief article presents a practical approach to writing a journal article, regardless of the language used. Scientific writing, as in any other writings, requires clear and concise expressions. In addition, scientific writing expects authors to (1) organize for quick access to specific sections; (2) describe experiments and findings in sufficient details so that they can be duplicated; (3) interpret data for the readers; and (4) summarize and discuss the significance of results and their relation to existing knowledge. This article will discuss the IMRAD format (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion). The focus will be on what should be included in each section of the format.

Language↗

PubMed2000

Mirror writing and handedness.

It has been reported that left-handed subjects are better able to write in mirror-reversed script than right-handers (Tankle & Heilman, 1983). Vaid and Stiles Davis (1989) conducted studies which led them to contradict the supposed superiority of left-handers in this area. In these studies, left as well as right-handed subjects were examined under normal- and mirror-writing conditions. Both examinations included the analysis of writing time and the accuracy of mirror writing (error rates). Using a digitizing tablet, we examined normal- and mirror-writing performance of left-handers, right-handers, and left-handed subjects who habitually write with their right hand. Our results support the finding of Tankle and Heilman (1983) that left-handers perform better in mirror-writing tasks.

Adult↗

PubMed1986

Incidence of left-handed writers and the inverted writing position in a sample of 2194 German elementary school children.

In a sample of 2194 German elementary school children, 6.9% of the females and 9.5% of the males wrote with the left hand. The proportion of left-handers writing with the inverted writing position was much higher than in comparable Canadian samples, particularly in the early grades. The higher incidence in early grades was related to the earlier introduction of cursive style writing in the German sample. There was a significant effect of writing position on the directional consistency of the letter shafts in the writing samples: noninverted writers were more inconsistent in their letter shaft orientation within and between words than inverted writers. The results stress adaptation to the technical demands of left-handed writing in the genesis of the inverted writing position, in support of recent studies (Guiard and Millerat, Neuropsychologia 22, 535-538, 1984) that come to similar conclusions.

Child↗

PubMed1993

Hemispatial factors in mirror writing.

The effect of the hemispace in which writing was performed was assessed in two left hemisphere stroke patients who demonstrated left-handed mirror writing. Both patients produced significantly more mirrored words when writing in right, as compared to left (body) hemispace. We suggest that writing in the right hemispace activates the left hemisphere. Further, we propose that mirror writing in the right hemispace is attributable to activation of the damaged left hemisphere spatial system, which fails to assist in the translation of right hand motor programs into those appropriate to the left hand. Writing in left hemispace, in contrast, activates the intact right hemisphere based spatial system which guides the execution or monitoring of motor productions in left hemispace. The result is writing which remains directionally correct when the left hand is used in left hemispace.

Agraphia↗

PubMed2001

Left superior parietal cortex involvement in writing: integrating fMRI with lesion evidence.

Writing is a uniquely human skill that we utilize nearly everyday. Lesion studies in patients with Gerstmann's syndrome have pointed to the parietal cortex as being critical for writing. Very little information is, however, available about the precise anatomical location of brain regions subserving writing in normal healthy individuals. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate parietal lobe function during writing to dictation. Significant clusters of activation were observed in left superior parietal lobe (SPL) and the dorsal aspects of the inferior parietal cortex (IPC) bordering the SPL. Localized clusters of activation were also observed in the left premotor cortex, sensorimotor cortex and supplementary motor area. No activation cluster was observed in the right hemisphere. These results clearly indicate that writing appears to be primarily organized in the language-dominant hemisphere. Further analysis revealed that within the parietal cortex, activation was significantly greater in the left SPL, compared to left IPC. Together with lesion studies, findings from the present study provide further evidence for the essential role of the left SPL in writing. Deficits to the precise left hemisphere parietal cortex regions identified in the present study may specifically underlie disorders of writing observed in Gerstmann's syndrome and apractic agraphia.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1999

Eye-dominance, writing hand, and throwing hand.

Handedness and eye-dominance are undoubtedly associated statistically, although a previous meta-analysis has found that the precise relationship is difficult to explain, with about 35% of right-handers and 57% of left-handers being left eye dominant. Of particular difficulty to genetic or other models is that the proportions are distributed asymmetrically around 50%. The present study asked whether this complicated pattern of association occurred because, following Peters, it is necessary to divide right-and left-handers into consistent handers (who write and throw with the same hand) and inconsistent handers (who write and throw with opposite hands). In an analysis of 10,635 subjects from questionnaire studies, 28.8% of left-handers and 1.6% of right-handers by writing were inconsistent for throwing. Our results also showed that writing hand and throwing hand both relate independently to eyedness, that throwing hand is somewhat more strongly associated with eyedness, and that the awkward asymmetry around 50% is now removed, 24.2% of consistent right-handers being left eye dominant compared with 72.3% of consistent left-handers, and 55.4% of inconsistent right-handers compared with 47.0% of inconsistent left-handers. We conclude that eyedness is phenotypically secondary to writing and throwing handedness. In our discussion we note that eyedness runs in families, we present new data suggesting that writing hand and throwing hand are co-inherited, and we argue that further data are now required to model properly the associations of writing hand, throwing hand, and eyedness, as well as probably also footedness and language dominance.

Journal Article↗