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The author discusses how nurse educators can enhance students' writing abilities, concluding with strategies to promote good writing in nursing programs. The author shares her experiences with a university-wide writing in the disciplines and a writing ombudsmen program.
The writing process offers a valuable medium for informing esthetic knowing in nursing. First, characteristics of esthetic patterns of knowing in nursing are described. Esthetic knowing in world literature is then illustrated through the writings of Proust. Next, composition theories and research are used to identify ways in which writing can shape esthetic knowing. Finally, the author presents implications for the use of writing to foster esthetic patterns of knowing in nursing.
Those who have sometimes thought about writing for a professional journal should be encouraged by the fact that most journal writers are the same as journal readers-practitioners and educators with something of value to share with others. There are career-enhancing advantages in journal writing, and there can be a significant amount of personal satisfaction as well. Succeeding at writing and placing a journal article requires: selecting an appropriate topic; knowing the publication and its audience and framing the article in the appropriate style; working with the journal editor to create an acceptable manuscript, which includes responding positively to the editor's criticisms and suggestions; and observing all submission requirements and deadlines. One who follows this entire process to its positive conclusion will find that journal writing can be an exacting, demanding, frustrating--and immensely satisfying--professional activity.
Primary writing tremor is a rare motor disorder in which tremor occurs primarily during writing and is not accompanied by other neurological symptoms and/or signs. Its etiopathogenesis is unknown, and treatment approaches remain largely empirical. Based on the effectiveness of botulinum toxin injections in writing dysfunction, we effectively used botulinum toxin type A for the treatment of primary writing tremor in a series of patients seen over a period of 5 years. Of the 5 patients, four received injections and reported significant and sustained treatment benefit for a period of at least 1 year. One patient declined botulinum toxin injections and responded moderately when treated with trihexyphenidyl.
Student journals are used at all levels of education to facilitate academic and personal learning. This paper describes the experience of journal writing from both a student and teacher perspective, in a communication skills course for first-year medical students at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. As one of the requirements of the course, students described their individual reactions to each weekly session in a journal. Teachers responded to each journal entry. Guidelines for journal usage in this course are described. The content of the journals includes topic-related information, comments concerning the student's individual experience of the course, and personal thoughts related to life experiences and becoming a doctor. A summary of evaluations of journal writing by teachers and students is presented. We have observed that journal writing facilitates a personal and reflective perspective to the first-year medical curriculum for both students and teachers. Journal writing appears to initiate and encourage self-awareness by providing a safe place for students to describe their experiences and relationships and to question their own values and beliefs. In the journal, through a mutual sharing of thoughts and feelings, barriers between students and teachers are diminished, leading to enhanced rapport and communication.
In our work with families that struggle with a chronic illness, we have relied on three ideas. First, we regard illness as a relationally traumatizing experience, not just for the person with the illness, but for other members of the family as well. We use the phrase "relational trauma" because of its effects on members of a wider system who also show signs of physical stress, isolation, and helplessness (Sheinberg & Fraenkel, 2000). Our second concern is how the conversation that leads to new stories is expanded through the development of voice and the use of writing. Looking at language, we are particularly attentive to the social prevalence of negative metaphors that surround and engulf the ill person and her family: dependence, poor genes, repressed personalities, weak constitutions, et cetera (Sontag, 1984). These negative metaphors, or outside voices, join with the inner voices of the ill person and result in a silence that disconnects people at a time when connections must be relied on and above question. Our third emphasis is on the use of writing as the means to create new voices, metaphors, and multiple descriptions that can reinvigorate the conversations silenced by the illness. Once the family's voices are reconstituted through writing, the emotions that have been displaced by the illness are restored to their conversation. I have included new research from JAMA detailing the treatment of patients with chronic illness through their use of writing.
A cylinder seal and carved greenstone plaque bearing glyphs dating to approximately 650 B.C. have been uncovered near the Olmec center of La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico. These artifacts, which predate others containing writing, reveal that the key aspects of the Mesoamerican scripts were present in Olmec writing: the combination of pictographic and glyphic elements to represent speech; the use of the sacred 260-day calendar; and the connection between writing, the calendar, and kingship. They imply that Mesoamerican writing originated in the La Venta polity.
Many undergraduate and graduate students understand neither the process of scientific writing nor the significance of peer review. In response, some instructors have created writing assignments that teach or mimic parts of the scientific publishing process. However, none fully reproduced peer review and revision of papers together with the writing and publishing process from research to final, accepted draft. In addition, most have been instituted at the graduate rather than undergraduate level. We present a detailed method for teaching undergraduate students the full scientific publishing process, including anonymous peer review, during the process of writing a "term paper." The result is a review article in the format for submission to a major scientific journal. This method has been implemented in the course Cell and Molecular Biology for Engineers at the University of Virginia. Use of this method resulted in improved grades, much higher quality in the final manuscript, greater objectivity in grading, and improved understanding of the importance of peer review.
The study of Freud's personal conception of writing and his use of it illuminates a significant aspect of his relationship with others, and also his sense of his own heroic greatness. In two related periods of his life, acts of writing--which were notably overdetermined in Freud and which informed as well as facilitated a distinctive kind of self-expression--gave rise to veritable (w)rites of passage. In those periods, the transferential dynamics in Freud's relationships with Fliess, his daughter Anna, and certain important analysands were expressed in ways connected with the content and process of various types of writing, including editing and translating. In sum, there is something still to be discovered in Freud's attitudes to his writing and to related intergenerational transactions between analysts and analysands who engage together in compositional activities.
A 2-year project to improve the writing skills of children who are deaf included instruction for teachers in the process approach to teaching writing. The project encompassed 10 public school programs for students who are deaf and included 325 students in Grades 4-10 and 52 teachers. The project included specific training goals for teachers, a self-report procedure for the teachers, and a data-collection and analysis phase to assess short-term effects on students' writing. Teacher self-reports indicated widespread involvement in the project, and pretest and posttest results showed dramatic improvement in students' writing--particularly in grammatical skills. Scoring systems for students' papers are included.
This study investigated the effects of teaching a metacognitive text structure strategy upon the paragraph writing skills of eighth-grade students with learning disabilities. The technique, called Statement-Pie (Hanau, 1974), teaches students to understand the relationship of supporting details to a main idea. Four students were taught to use an outline as a paragraph planning guide, which they then used to convert information into written expository paragraphs. All subjects reached instructional outcome criterion on the writing of comparison/contrast and sequence paragraphs. One week after reaching mastery in the special education classroom, students generalized their paragraph writing skills to other teachers and to different classrooms. The results of this investigation indicate that when provided with direct, intensive instruction in a text structure strategy, adolescents with learning disabilities can improve their skills in paragraph writing.
The present study evaluated the idea that the hemisphere-specific cognitive demands of reading and writing may induce task-specific maladaptive patterns of language lateralization in children with dyslexia. Situation-specific lateralization was examined in a repeated measures design under three dichotic listening conditions: baseline, concurrent reading, and concurrent writing. Twelve males with phonological dyslexia, 8 to 12 years old, were compared to 12 age-matched and 12 younger reading-matched good readers. Lateralization patterns were examined for condition-specific relationships to pseudoword decoding, word recognition, reading comprehension, spelling, and arithmetic. The results show that dyslexia is not related to incomplete lateralization or to a failure to inhibit verbal processing in the right hemisphere during reading and writing. Reading increased the lateralization of the children with dyslexia, which had a negative relation to arithmetic; writing caused a decrease in lateralization, which was linked specifically to deficits in phonological decoding and visual word recognition. The results suggest that children with dyslexia suffer from a selective linguistic vulnerability to left-hemisphere interference from the idiosyncratic attentional and processing demands of particular school tasks. Dyslexia is a much more dynamic and environmentally sensitive disorder than previously thought.
After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers' bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research.
The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) Task Force on Practice Guidelines makes every effort to avoid any actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest that might arise as a result of an industry relationship or personal interest of the writing committee. Specifically, all members of the writing committee, as well as peer reviewers of the document, were asked to provide disclosure statements of all such relationships that might be perceived as real or potential conflicts of interest. These statements are reviewed by the parent task force, reported orally to all members of the writing committee at each meeting, and updated and reviewed by the writing committee as changes occur. Please see Appendix 1 for author relationships with industry and Appendix 2 for peer reviewer relationships with industry. These guidelines attempt to define practices that meet the needs of most patients in most circumstances. These guideline recommendations reflect a consensus of expert opinion after a thorough review of the available, current scientific evidence and are intended to improve patient care. If these guidelines are used as the basis for regulatory/payer decisions, the ultimate goal is quality of care and serving the patient's best interests. The ultimate judgment regarding care of a particular patient must be made by the healthcare provider and patient in light of all the circumstances presented by that patient.
Once researchers have completed a clinical trial and analyzed the data, they have a duty to make the results known to their peers by writing a manuscript suitable for publication in a biomedical journal. Before beginning any writing, those involved in the clinical drug trial first need to decide among themselves who is to be the first author and secondary authors, the readership they want to influence, and the most appropriate target journal to reach this readership. For content and formatting of the manuscript, writers need to carefully follow the instructions for authors as stipulated by the target journal. In general, a manuscript based on a clinical trial is presented sequentially in four sections: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD). The introduction concisely presents background information about the topic that was researched in the clinical trial, provides the study hypothesis, and describes the study rationale, purpose, and objectives. The Methods section delineates the study design, subject/patient selection process, procedures, end points, and types of analysis conducted in the clinical trial to investigate the study hypothesis. The Results section presents the findings of the clinical trial, and the Discussion section interprets the meaning of these findings, assesses how the findings answer the study hypothesis, and compares the study data with findings reported in earlier studies. Writers should select a title for the clinical trial manuscript that is fewer than 10 words and which embodies the essence of the study findings clearly and specifically without being sensationalistic. Writers should create the abstract last; the abstract should provide an overview of the manuscript and stimulate readers' interest. Overall, following the above principles in writing a manuscript based on a clinical drug trial will make the actual writing easier and more enjoyable, as well as increase the possibility of the manuscript being accepted for publication.
BACKGROUND: To improve their ability in written expression children need to be given adequate practice. It is suggested that current methods do not always encourage pupils to write nor do they foster independence. AIMS: This study attempts to develop further a strategy which promotes independence through self-management and improves writing skills under the process approach. SAMPLE: The sample comprised a class of 32 fourth-grade girls in a primary school in Athens for which the researcher was also the teacher. METHODS: An ABAB repeated-measures withdrawal design was used. Story writing was encouraged using a self-management package. In addition to the feedback given through using the package the girls also received responsive feedback from the teacher every time they wrote. RESULTS: Quantitative and qualitative analyses were employed to show that both quantity and quality of the children's writing improved. CONCLUSIONS: The effectiveness of this approach, which was modified and improved from a previous study, was demonstrated in another country. Its feasibility was also shown in that the researcher was, at the same time, the class teacher.
Clinicians are busy people who must develop strategies for making time to write. With many obligations, their first strategy may be to try to clear the decks to make way for the current project. When writing takes on a more constant challenge, medical writers find themselves wedging writing in between myriad other tasks and commitments. Ultimately, committed writers, with effort and help, find a way to schedule writing as another essential activity in their lives.
To assess whether writing with cognitive change or exposure instructions reduces depression or suicidality, 121 undergraduates screened for suicidality wrote for 20 minutes on 4 days over 2 weeks. They were randomly assigned to reinterpret or to write and rewrite traumatic events/emotions, or to write about innocuous topics. The three groups (N = 98) who completed pre-, post-, and 6-week follow-up were not different on suicidality or depression. All subjects reported fewer automatic negative thoughts over the 2 weeks; they also reported higher self-regard but more health center visits at follow-up. Suicidal thoughts may be more resistant than physical health to writing interventions.