nursing writing samples

nursing writing samples

The Importance of Nursing Writing Samples in Academic and Professional Development

1. Introduction to Nursing Writing Samples

Inclusive writing activities for nursing students may include the worldview assignment, the patient clinical record, the research paper, the professionalism reflection, the creative communication, the nurse patient teaching, the narrative influence on personal development as a future professional, the concept map, the undergraduate discussion agenda, and the focus assignment in care for individuals, the interview paper, and others. With the help of nurse educators, nursing students can develop their communicative and clinical writing competences. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the importance of nursing writing samples as part of the nursing undergraduate curriculum in the professional and academic development of nursing students. To fulfill this purpose, we present studies related to the improvement of patients’ clinical records in a nursing curriculum and the importance of writing a patient clinical record for fourth-year graduate nurses in a Brazilian nursing school. These studies emphasize the importance of factual, complete, and accurate nursing narratives that lead to horizontal and vertical communication between nurses and other healthcare professionals, essentially focusing on nursing clinical skills, interprofessional communication, students’ collective learning, and the developing a professional identity as students begin their process of socialization into the healthcare profession through a great variety of nurse-led interventions.

Nursing care and practice rely on professional relationships in the work environment and well-functioning teams, relationships that depend on effective professional and personal communication to ensure the care delivered and the satisfaction of nursing practice. Successful and safe outcomes of patient care are fostered by communication skills, especially in the creation of patient clinical records and report to urgent situations, interprofessional reports, and ongoing communication between nurses and physician colleagues. The development of these skills is not only important in clinical situations but is also essential in nurses’ formation as professionals in their academic education. To acquire such communication skills, nursing students must acquire the ability to write, a skill students may not become proficient in unless “explicitly taught”.

2. Benefits of Utilizing Nursing Writing Samples

An example by example format is used to offer official and original nursing documents written by nursing students, nursing faculty, and those contributed to the profession by professional nurses. Examples of issues related to the nursing field that will assist a novice in developing the needed writing are included for each section based on the seriousness of the skill demonstrated. This can serve as a valuable guide so that students will not spend valuable time purchasing either generally available written nursing material alone, which is not crucial in the preparation of the individual student. The students are warned to use the examples found in the guide as a checklist because many of them will need to be rewritten to encompass the critical thinking activities of different levels of excellence.

A nursing student has shared the following examples of questions they ask their nursing instructors to provide them with the best guidelines so that they might improve their critical thinking skills in such areas as nursing writing: “Can you give us a grading rubric when we are assigned a paper? When you give us an assignment, can you also provide us with an example of an excellent paper so that we can visualize what the end product should be like? If we have doubts about our papers, can we come and see you to clarify those doubts? And will the same person grade all the unit’s papers?”

The youthful author, who has become an acknowledged leader in the nursing profession (with more than 50 years of contributions), in 1980 began to stress the importance of utilizing writing as a critical area in academic and professional development. Providing examples of nursing writing and a guideline that clarifies the elements that must be present at various academic levels of critical thinking provide the student with a clear picture of their goals.

3. Types of Nursing Writing Samples and How to Use Them Effectively

First to be considered are the custom writing assignments that a university writing center helped students in senior level variation and trends in nursing and issues and trends in graduate advanced nursing roles and practice courses to improve so they would demonstrate progress toward the writing learning mastery expected of an advanced practice nurse. The second section describes an e-portfolio presentation that students completed in a PhD in nursing program. Throughout the case description, we share guidelines to help nursing programs create and revise such important learning products. Simply creating them is not sufficient; program-wide ownership is also needed if these learning products are to be valued by students, faculty, and potential employers.

Hunt notes that advanced practice programs in various disciplines “require that the portfolio demonstrates the students’ ‘journey’ to advanced status.” This journey should not be limited to evidencing new understandings gained in these programs’ curricula, but should also include detailed information about the students’ prior academic as well as clinical practice work. The intention of such a portfolio approach is to enable faculty to identify gaps in new knowledge compared with what students already understand and thus guide individuals toward specific advanced studies coursework options that would be beneficial. We present here two senior-level nursing custom writing assignments, two graduate advanced practice papers, and a graduate e-portfolio product.

4. Best Practices for Creating High-Quality Nursing Writing Samples

Recruiting few others to undertake manuscript writing by reproducing previously considered acceptable work is the result. Faculty who complete research and writing for pull technology publications in peer-reviewed journal has primary focus on assuring members of related knowledge communities mutuality of interests continuity of nurse scientists and congruence with professional practice indicators. Their frequently-established duplicity of practice involving manuscript preparation for pull technology publication mandates collegial assistance and planned professional development. Data obtained from many years of student writing exercises suggest that rather than accept curriculum that may allow student-friendliness to float naïve writing strategies, faculty should prepare students to merge meantime to now. “Your ideal student-reporting-to-the-job” is an unfair teacher question to raise. Is this your considered response?

When faculty members receive students who report they have ‘immersed’ themselves in requisite reading and completed all requisite manuscript writing, and who are prepared for advanced clinical practice, faculty may feel skeptical. After months or years of coaching hundreds of students through development of manuscripts that they ‘hate to write’ that are developed with significant elements of cut-and-paste technology. ‘No time to immerse or learn,’ ‘fancy research or creativity is not my goal,’ and ‘writing was never accurately called an art form’ are frequent signals. Yet multiple adhere-to-advancing-career-rules systems abound (e.g., nurse licensure applications; advanced practice nurse role delineation and function scenarios; academic promotion portfolios) require mutually exclusive proof that ‘I am not exceptional.’

5. Conclusion: The Role of Writing Samples in Nursing Education and Practice

Even in the electronic age, developing one’s professional portfolio involves demonstrating one’s cognitive aptitude, personal maturity, and communication prowess. Given the lodestone roles played by writing samples in hiring and promotion decisions, nurse faculty assume a pivotal role in helping develop new graduates’ writing portfolios. If these artifacts evidence insufficient delineation of key ideas, and abundant spelling, grammar, or graphic presentation errors, potential employers and graduate admissions committee members will view the nurse-preceptor, school of nursing, and previous course-setting instructors who passed the nurse-learner as green or cagey, backward, and potentially incompetent. The passion, time, teaching enthusiasm, education quality, skill transfer potential, professional validity, and caring-communicative mentoring roles defining the faculty-for-hire marketability of the school supply the demand. The prosperity or the professional endeavors of school exposed to the glare of external stakeholders.

Nurse educators and preceptors in academic and practice settings must recognize how important nurse writing is to facilitating students’ and novices’ entry into the genre of nurse writing. Because failure to construct writing samples may lock students into the architecture of the nurse-writing genre and scaffold ill-preparedness, all instructors in nursing writing across the major, specialty, and professional formation levels need to be more generous, inclusive, and developmentally oriented with students. Writing to learn is a powerful constructivist teaching strategy that can guide students toward developing their self-understanding and nurse-learner role. Faculty can offer low-risk opportunities for nurse-learners to express their inner thoughts and emotional responses experiences. Assigning emotions or narrative-centered writing allows nurse-learners the ability to reflect on actual human experiences, express their genuine emotional engagement with the clinical content, and transmit their empathy to their instructors and professional peers.