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PubMed1988

Clinical writing and the documentary construction of schizophrenia.

Psychiatric practice involves writing as much as it involves talking. This study examines the interpretive processes of reading, writing and interviewing which are central to the clinical interaction. It is part of a broader ethnographic study of an Australian psychiatric hospital (which specializes in the treatment of patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia). The paper examines two major types of written assessment of patients--the admission assessment and the 'complete work-up.' Writing is analyzed as performance, thereby focusing on the transformations that are effected in patients, their perceptions of their schizophrenia, and their total identity. One crucial transformation is from 'person suffering from schizophrenia' to 'schizophrenic.' The paper aims to show that as much as psychiatry is a 'talking cure' it is also a 'writing cure.'

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Analysis of writing in an epilepsy center population: a prospective blinded study.

Sixty adult comprehensive epilepsy center patients were given a simple writing task to complete. The essays were scored using four unique scales: Subject--whether the writing concentrated on physical or emotional aspects of the seizures; Focus-how much of the essay was on task; Ratio--a measure of detail; Word--total word count. Among the findings, patients with nonepileptic events (n=28) tended to write essays containing both physical and emotional components (P=0.058), whereas those with partial seizures (n=28) did not (P=0.006). Essays concentrating on emotional aspects increased the likelihood of a diagnosis of partial seizures (P=0.059). The variance of Ratio was higher in those without nonepileptic events than in those with nonepileptic events (P=0.0003), whereas it was higher in the group with partial seizures than in the group without partial seizures (P=0.000008). This study suggests unique features associated with the writing of patients with epilepsy and those with nonepileptic events.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1999

Empirical foundations for writing in prevention and psychotherapy: mental and physical health outcomes.

The use of writing, alone or in conjunction with traditional psychotherapy, has increased substantially in recent years. The most widespread use of writing has been for single-shot ad hoc purposes or to log behavior. The purpose of this review is to summarize a decade of research demonstrating the efficacy of writing about past traumatic experiences on mental and physical health outcomes. It is widely acknowledged in our culture that putting upsetting experiences into words can be healthy. Research from several domains indicates that talking with friends, confiding to a therapist, praying, and even writing about one's thoughts and feelings can be physically and mentally beneficial. This review highlights advances in written disclosure that determine some therapeutic outcomes. In addition, we attempt to explore the mechanisms that predict improved psychological and physical health. Finally, limitations of previous studies are highlighted, and suggestions for future research and application are made.

Anxiety Disorders↗

PubMed1998

Journal writing as a social support strategy for parents of premature infants: a pilot study.

BACKGROUND: Having a premature baby is acknowledged to be stressful to parents. Journal writing combines practical, emotional and informational support that may be useful to these parents. METHODS: We conducted a study to assess the potential for promoting journal-writing for parents receiving social support in a special care nursery (SCN). Parents were provided with educational material on journal writing, and subsequently surveyed concerning their journal-writing during their child's hospitalization. RESULTS: Of the 73 parents enrolled, 32% kept a journal; of these, 73% felt it helped considerably in reducing stress, and 68% used it as a means of addressing the most stressful elements of their nursery experience. Journals were used primarily to document involvement in care (45%), record-keeping (36%), and organization of thoughts (27%). All of those who kept a journal recommended it for use by other parents. CONCLUSIONS: Encouraging parents to keep a journal is a constructive way of dealing with the SCN-related stress.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2005

The reading, writing, and arithmetic of the medical literature, part 1.

OBJECTIVE: To offer suggestions that will help clinicians improve their scrutiny of the medical literature and apply these suggestions to their own medical writings. DATA SOURCES: Literature searches began at the National Library of Medicine's online database and were traced to primary sources. STUDY SELECTION: All referenced information in this article was cited from primary sources. RESULTS: Objective criteria should be used when assessing the quality of clinical research reports and writing accurate, substantive reports. When reading or writing a journal article, authors should ask themselves if it meets the following standards of high quality: Is the topic or problem important and relevant to current practice? Is the stated reason for the study design valid? Is the description of the study methods clear enough to allow for replication by other researchers? What interventions are being compared, and is the comparison reasonable? Is the number of patients in the study sufficient to show a statistically significant difference? Do the study results have clinical relevance? Are new findings described in relation to the literature? Are both positive and negative aspects of the study addressed? Is the existing literature cited sufficiently? Do the results support the conclusions? CONCLUSION: Reading and interpreting the medical literature require a set of skills that can be learned. Similarly, good medical writing skills can be developed. Achieving these skills should enhance the clinician's practice of medicine.

Authorship↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Tips for scholarly writing in nursing.

Professional nurses, and certainly those in academia and nursing service leadership positions, are experiencing an increasing need for writing skills. Among the most important skills required for scholarly writing are those relating to critical thinking. With this in mind, suggestions for scholarly writing in nursing are presented in this article, organized according to Paul's criteria for critical thinking: clarity, precision, specificity, accuracy, relevance, consistency, logicalness, depth, completeness, significance, fairness, and adequacy for purpose. Although becoming proficient in scholarly writing takes time and effort, the rewards in terms of career advancement, professional contributions, and personal satisfaction and enjoyment are considerable.

Guidelines as Topic↗

PubMed1997

Expressive writing moderates the relation between intrusive thoughts and depressive symptoms.

The author investigated whether expressive writing enhances emotional adaptation to a stressful event (graduate entrance exams) by reducing event-related intrusive thoughts or by desensitizing people to such thoughts. Participants in the experimental group, who were instructed to write their deepest thoughts and feelings about the exam, exhibited a significant decline in depressive symptoms from 1 month (Time 1) to 3 days (Time 2) before the exam. Participants in the control group, who wrote about a trivial topic, maintained a relatively high level of depressive symptoms over this same period. Expressive writing did not affect the frequency of intrusive thoughts, but it moderated the impact of intrusive thoughts on depressive symptoms. Specifically, intrusive thoughts at Time 1 were positively related to depressive symptoms at Time 2 in the control group and were unrelated to symptoms in the expressive writing group.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed2006

Does expressive writing reduce health care utilization? A meta-analysis of randomized trials.

This meta-analysis examined whether writing about stressful experiences affects health care utilization (HCU) compared with writing on neutral topics or no-writing control groups. Randomized controlled trials of 30 independent samples representing 2,294 participants were located that contained sufficient information to calculate effect sizes. After omitting one study as an outlier, the effects were combined within 3 homogeneous groups: healthy samples (13 studies), samples with preexisting medical conditions (6 studies), and samples prescreened for psychological criteria (10 studies). Combined effect sizes, Hedges's g (95% confidence interval), with random effects estimation were 0.16 (0.02, 0.31), 0.21 (-0.02, 0.43), and 0.06 (-0.12, 0.24), respectively. Writing about stressful experiences reduces HCU in healthy samples but not in samples defined by medical diagnoses or exposure to stress or other psychological factors. The significance of these effects for individuals' health is unknown.

Health Services↗

PubMed1993

Writing quality, reading skills, and domain knowledge as factors in text comprehension.

Subjects listened to and recalled three passages. Each subject was also given a general reading comprehension test. The passages were presented either in such a way that subjects could use their general knowledge to help understand them, or in such a way that no specific world knowledge seemed applicable. This was achieved by giving the passages a helpful title, versus no title or an unhelpful title. The passages were written in two different versions, preserving their content but varying their style. In one version, the language was as helpful as we could make it in signalling to the listener discourse importance, while in the other version the language was as unhelpful as we could make it while still writing an English text. All three factors--domain knowledge, writing style, and skill--significantly affected reproductive recall, and there were no interactions between these factors. However, while good writing was sufficient to improve the reproduction of the texts, an analysis of the recall elaborations subjects made revealed that the correctness of their elaborations depended strongly on the availability of appropriate domain knowledge. Thus, good writing and domain knowledge are not simply substitutable, but affect comprehension in somewhat different ways.

Adult↗

PubMed1991

A selective deficit for writing vowels in acquired dysgraphia.

Brain-damaged patients with acquired writing disorders provide important information about the normal processes of spelling and writing. Current models indicate that to produce a letter string, its 'abstract' representation is computed and stored in a temporary orthographic buffer, from which it is converted to a verbal code (if the word is to be spelled aloud) or to a physical letter code (if the word is to be written). The stored graphemic representations specify the identity and order of the component letters and their consonant/vowel status. Here I describe the spelling performance of two patients with a selective deficit in writing vowels. When writing words, the first patient omitted all vowels, leaving a blank space between consonants or consonant clusters, whereas the second produced errors that almost exclusively involved vowels. This pattern of performance supports the hypothesis that the consonant/vowel status of graphemes is differentially specified in the spelling process and may be selectively affected after brain damage.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Simplifying the writing process for the novice writer.

Nurses take responsibility for reading information to update their professional knowledge and to meet relicensure requirements. However, nurses are less enthusiastic about writing for professional publication. This article explores the reluctance of nurses to write, the reasons why writing for publication is important to the nursing profession, the importance of mentoring to potential writers, and basic information about simplifying the writing process for novice writers.

Humans↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Improving faculty publication output: the role of a writing coach.

Publishing academic papers is recognized by faculty as vital not only to their careers, but also to the standing of their school within the university and the discipline. Although writing is perceived as a critical, high-priority task, it often has low follow-through behavior. To facilitate the publication output of our faculty, a part-time writing coach was hired. Blanchard's situational leadership II model (1985), which tailors leadership style to the needs of the group, indicated a framework of coaching and support would best meet faculty writing needs. The literature further suggested that an ongoing coaching relationship in the form of a committed partnership would empower faculty to achieve beyond prior performance. We present a model to show how coaching and support facilitate perseverance in writing for publication. Sixteen of 26 faculty sought the coach's help in the first 2.5 years, generating 21 submissions to peer-reviewed journals. Fifteen of these were published or accepted (71 per cent), and one was still under review when this article was written. Five rejected papers had not yet been resubmitted. Faculty with recent doctorates appeared to benefit most from coaching.

Faculty, Nursing↗

PubMed1988

[The difference in writing disorders in primary agraphia and congenital dyslexia and their clinical relevance].

If after a brain injury reading and writing disturbances persist, the question is: primary agraphia or writing disorders due to dyslexia? If the anamnesis cannot answer this question, a decision is possible by means of four essential differences between writing disorders on the background of primary agraphia and those associated with dyslexia: 1. Agraphic persons correct their mistakes, dyslectics do not. 2. The word formations (paragraphias) due to primary agraphia do not bear close phonetical resemblances, whereas word formations by dyslectic persons are plainly phonetical. 3. Agraphics persevere, dyslectics do not. 4. In primary agraphia, the patient will also show difficulties in writing numbers; in a dyslectic disorder, he/she will not.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1997

The effects of race, weight, and gender on evaluations of writing competence.

This study examined the potential interactive effects of target race, weight, and gender on American Caucasian students' ratings of writing competency. Stimulus materials were eight articles in a newspaper byline format with photographs of the authors that conveyed the characteristics of race (African American/Caucasian), weight (overweight/nonoverweight), and gender (male/female). The participants were given eight articles and were asked to rate the writing competency of the author on the four qualities of style, clarity, logic, and overall writing ability/competency. The results showed that the women gave higher style, logic, and overall writing ability/competency ratings than did the men, and overweight authors received higher ratings of logic than nonoverweight authors. The men gave female Caucasian authors lower ratings of clarity than did female participants.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Writing for publication--a guide for new authors.

Health care practitioners who are inexperienced in writing for publication are sometimes daunted by the publication process and fail to submit their work on quality improvement to a journal. New authors can acquire experience in writing a paper by working through a systematic thought process that includes consideration of what journal readers and editors want and if the work is ready for publication. The most important part of writing a paper is to think through the key ideas and messages for readers and then to organize the ideas into a logical structure. Writing clear answers to 10 key questions may be one way to start the process.

Authorship↗

PubMed2006

Development of research paper writing skills of poultry science undergraduate students studying food microbiology.

Because food and poultry industries are demanding an improvement in written communication skills among graduates, research paper writing should be an integral part of a senior undergraduate class. However, scientific writing assignments are often treated as secondary to developing the technical skills of the students. Scientific research paper writing has been emphasized in an undergraduate course on advanced food microbiology taught in the Poultry Science Department at Texas A& M University (College Station, TX). Students' opinions suggest that research paper writing as part of a senior course in Poultry Science provides students with scientific communication skills and useful training for their career, but more emphasis on reading and understanding scientific literature may be required.

Agriculture↗

PubMed1983

Writing courses in American medical schools.

U.S. medical schools were surveyed to determine the extent and nature of instruction in medical writing. Of the 101 schools responding, only 15 offered writing courses. Seven of the 15 offered only brief seminars or workshops. The other eight offered full-term courses (greater than eight weeks or more than 15 hours of instruction). Those not offering courses indicated a need but claimed lack of time, lack of interest on the part of those needing instruction, or lack of qualified faculty members as major reasons for not having the courses. These obstacles can be overcome by designing the writing course to complement existing elements of the curriculum and by soliciting the help of writing specialists on campus.

Curriculum↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The write content: a guide for revising and grading texts and manuscripts.

Your writing should reflect the way you think and work and should, therefore, be in accordance with the requirements of the scientific method. The WRITE CONTENT lists nine desirable features of scientific writing along with descriptions of how they are facilitated in the writing process. Assembled in checklist form, these features become the criteria that can guide composition and evaluation.

Education, Nursing↗